Culture
A brush with… Wolfgang Tillmans
In this episode of A Brush With, host Ben Luke engages with renowned photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, exploring his innovative approach to photography and installation art. Tillmans discusses the inter...
A brush with… Wolfgang Tillmans
Culture •
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Speaker A
A Brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture platform. Created by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg Connects lets you access museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Download the app to access digital guides and explore a variety of content. Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to a new series of A Brush with, the podcast from the Art newspaper in which I talk to artists about the their influences from writers to musicians, filmmakers, and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. And this episode is A Brush With Wolfgang Tillmans. Before I continue, I wanted to remind you about my new book, what is Art 4? Titled after the final question in the A Brush with series and published by Henny, it features edited versions of 25 artist interviews drawn from this podcast since 2020, along with embellished introductions, brand new texts and an abundance of beautiful reproductions of the artists works and those by other is available now online and in all good bookshops so Wolfgang Tielmans has changed the history of photography. He has taken established genres of art and the photographic medium, from portraiture to still life, landscape, political subjects and abstraction, and relentlessly experimented with the framing, printing and presentation of his images and photographic objects. His subjects include everything from urgent imagery of social events like protests or club nights, formal portraits and experimental cameraless photography. From the very start of his now close to four decades career, Wolfgang has shown his works in installations that respond specifically to the intricacies of the spaces in which they are displayed, with the photographs presented in formats that range from postcard size to vast and enveloping prints. The images might abut the corner of a room, be hung high up on the walls, or unorthodoxly low and adjacent to bureaucratic elements like fire exit signs and fire extinguishers. They might be organised in flurries or constellations, or in spare linear arrangements or grids. Through this process, Wolfgang consistently re energizes his archive, juxtaposing images taken years and sometimes decades apart. While photography has remained his primary medium, Wolfgang has steadily expanded his disciplines, with video installation, text and sound and music gaining increasing prominence in his exhibitions. Wolfgang was born in 1968 in Remscheid in Germany, and took his first photographs as a child fascinated with astronomy, using his father's camera to try to capture what he saw through a telescope. But the first image he regards as a mature work is lacanot self, from 1986, made when he was 18 and featuring a near abstract rendering of his own body looking down over a pink T shirt Black and white Adidas shorts, his knee and a golden sandy beach. In its irreverence for pictorial and photographic convention, it is a remarkably mature image, a portent of many of the images of bodies and leisure that followed. Around the same time, while in Hamburg on community service, since he'd avoided the then compulsory military service due to his pacifism, Wolfgang discovered the photocopier as an artistic medium, working with found images as well as those he took himself. Indeed, he said that he bought a camera in order to take photographs that he could photocopy. He said he learned to speak the language of photography by degrading or abstracting photographs. The first examples that he showed in Caffe Nosa in Hamburg were called approaches, made between 1987 and 1988 and involved multiple versions of the same image with a narrowed cropping using the photocopy's zoom function, pushing it closer to illegibility. It's striking that even in these earliest pieces there was a commitment to what is called a deconstruction of photographs. Perhaps more important was that he also published his first feature of photographs the following year in the magazine id, which focused on Hamburg's thriving club scene. It was the first of numerous such assignments, and Wolfgang continues to explore popular print formats today with a similarly sharp eye for irreverent layouts that he demonstrates in creating installations. Between 1990 and 1992, Wolfgang studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in England, and it was in the latter year that he had his first significant exposure in the art world. The London based gallerist Maureen Paley took one of his photographs of his friend and occasional subjects, Alex and Lutz, to Unfair, a fringe art fair in Cologne. That same year, the Galerie Buchholz in Cologne staged an exhibition at its two venues, both a white cube space and an antique dealer's. In the former, Wolfgang designed the first of his installations with a constellation of images. Across his career, Wolfgang has established parallel bodies of work that on the surface, explore vastly different concerns. In the same year, 1992, that he made the photographs featuring Alex and Lutz, which evoke subjects as broad as gender, the body in the landscape, love and friendship. He began his ongoing Silver series, in which he put undeveloped paper through a processing machine as it was being cleaned. The blemishes, which are dirt and residue from silver nitrate paper, plus the exposure to coloured light, create abstract compositions through a photographic process. But it's crucial to Wolfgang that while his bodies of work have disparate appearances, they have common concerns. Even photographs concerned with Realism, perhaps even approaching documentary, deal brilliantly with formal concerns like colour and composition. Meanwhile, Wolfgang explores abstraction in the full knowledge that viewers invariably connect photographic imagery with representation. So even works made without a camera, like the Beautiful series Freischwimmer, begun in 2003, may evoke in his audience associations with skin or blood or a landscape. Also fundamentally at its core, every photograph, from a portrait to an abstract image, is of course concerned to varying degrees, with light. The photographs of club scenes that Wolfgang began making in the 1980s are inevitably associated with youth culture, with freedom, rebellion and celebration. But it's also crucial that they're sites of political and social action. Wolfgang has said that the political is, for me, always connected to the personal. The manifestations of this have been broad. In 2005, for instance, he made the first iteration of an ongoing work called Truth Study Centre, in which images, objects, newspaper articles and other written materials were shown on tables and thus presented in a democratic format that encouraged the absorption of and engagement of multiple positions or contexts. It was a direct confrontation with the political distortion and disinformation that was exacerbated in the post 911 world, a phenomenon that's only grown as right wing populist governments and movements have increasingly gained power across the world in recent years. They run parallel to a strong political strain through his entire oeuvre, which has grown to become increasingly campaigning and activist in the past 20 years, including through his gallery and foundation Between Bridges. This is exemplified in his imagery relating to queer politics and identity, which reflect the extraordinary range of his photographic language, from intimate images of queer love and sex, photographs of club scenes around the world and famous gay icons. Shoots for Butt, the queer culture magazine, to a documentary feature for ID in which he interviewed and photographed people from the LGBTQ community in Gambia and campaigning materials related to HIV awareness. Though his works are dated in a conventional sense, they remain unfixed in time. By showing them in fresh contexts alongside new or much older pieces in vastly different configurations, their emotional impact and formal power feels constantly renewed. This was dramatically emphasised in Wolfgang's extraordinary presentation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that closed in the week that Wolfgang and I met for the very last exhibition at the Centre, before it closed for five years for renovations. He'd taken over the bpi, the public library that occupied the second floor of the building, using its environment and some of its furniture for an epic but deeply nuanced presentation of his vast output over the past 40 years, including his increasingly rich work in video and his recent experiments with sound art. And music. Wolfgang and I met at the Maureen Paley Gallery in London, in whose three venues he's presenting a range of work in the autumn of 2025 and at the moment in which he was composing his exhibition in one of the three spaces, which was one his studio. And it's this process with which I began our conversation. He's used a lovely word to describe a key factor in his approach to these wall and space filling compositions, rhythm. So I asked Wolfgang, what does he mean when he talks about the rhythm of his installation?
Speaker B
That's what I asked myself just upstairs earlier on seeing the works at Maureen Paley laid out on the floor. Kind of everything as planned in the model 1 to 10 scale architectural model in my studio in Berlin. Everything considered, everything going to plan. But how do I start? How do I set the tone? So when you ask how does the rhythm work? It's certainly layers that, you know. I like to think of the installations I make with pictures as also like timelines on a music program. How they are doing different things, different. Each. Each track is assigned to a different instrument and they are not running like that in a linear fashion across the gallery walls. But still there is something underlying. For example, an important underlying factor in my work are the print formats, which haven't changed in 35 years, with the exception of the medium size, which I started to alter in 2012. Do you want me to.
Speaker C
Well, yeah, it's the 10, three. One principle or one framed one unframed.
Speaker A
At the large scale, right?
Speaker B
Yes, yes. I mean, but the sizes are the 30 x 40 cm, 12, 16 inches and then the 20 x 24 inch, 5161 cm as the middle size. And then the large, which are typically 2 meters the long edge. And then there's the postcard size, which is a 10 by 15. And they all have their reason why they exist and they somehow build a matrix which is underlying everything I do. So whatever happens within these rectangles is not prescribed. But that you as a viewer moving from room to room, or in the case of the Pompidou show, like from different surfaces to different flat or walls, tables, there is an underlying rhythm of the paper formats. And I found that useful. You know, I know nobody asked me, don't cut the paper. Nobody said you shouldn't. Typically people would cut maybe the paper to the size of the image that's on the paper, but that's been always a philosophy of mine. I felt very drawn to that industrially produced paper and then the transformation that happens within it and on Its surface.
Speaker C
To me, that's at the core of that rhythm that you're talking about. What I love about it being related to a musical term is that there is this really fascinating balance between chance and control, which you've talked about in lots of aspects of your work. And that seems to me to be absolutely at the heart of this installation process, because I guess it's quite fraught. If one thing is out of place, can the whole thing collapse?
Speaker B
In some ways, collapse is maybe too much, because I do believe that the installations are made up of individual parts that can all stand on their own two feet. You know, when I started out in the 90s, some people said the installations are good and energetic, but the parts are not so noteworthy. And that's, of course, stemming from an either or mindset, which I've been observing, spent three decades observing in language. I'm quite sort of obsessive about observing language and how one often isn't allowing a thing to be two things, you know, to be a greater sum of the parts. But then the parts are actually also good and fully complete in themselves. And why shouldn't they? Because that's my lived experience every day. Like the world, life is always many. But of course, the building blocks are also completely worthy Contemplation, observation, and study and enjoyment.
Speaker C
Absolutely. One of the things that I think your work does so well is evidence that simultaneity that you're talking about, that the multiple registers at which your work operates are effective in all sorts of different ways. And that's when one inhabits those installations, one is aware that, on the one hand, yes, you have a singularity of an image, or you have a singularity.
Speaker A
Of an object, actually.
Speaker C
But at the same time, you're also seeing a landscape of imagery and a landscape of objects and multiple languages in which to realize different ideas. That, it seems to me, again, is at the core of the way that you bring the installations together, having that simultaneity.
Speaker B
I mean, for me, there's so much to see in each one of the works that are on the wall or in the show, and they together create a sound because in your head, they all, of course, are input and they resonate. They'll do something. They activate parts of the brain, and obviously the memory of what you've just seen, conscious or not conscious, is present. And so if you turn and look at the next wall, that study of some mushrooms, fungi on a tree, trun, that texture will somehow do something to your feelings also. And, I mean, it's about a feeling which I am also very happy to speak about. I observed in recent years that initially I've been very much against sort of too much explaining and I had no labels, you know, like my Tate Britain show was probably the first museum show on record that had zero text on the walls. And we. We had the whole brochure and all the titles were in the pamphlets. And to. Now I sometimes think I would love to almost have like a short text next to every piece. That would be actually interesting going against this sort of modernist gesture of the purity of the object on a white wall.
Speaker C
Yeah, but there's a really interesting to and fro, it seems to me, because I know you're very insistent on saying that they are absolutely physical things in the world. They are a picture foremost before they are an image. But then the image is tremendously important. And I suppose what you're saying is those two things can coexist. You can insist on a kind of physical importance of an object, but also insist on its content being vital. And obviously there is particularly modernism. There is a difficulty in that, you know, there can be too much content in modernist terms. But it seems to me it's really important that you are very insistent on the physicality of these things. You know, one of the things about the installations is that there is a variety going from the lighter series, which is tremendously abstract, to the most intimate images of people and places and so on.
Speaker B
That was a case of a question that I can only say yes to.
Speaker C
But I suppose is the composing of the installations is one of the balances you have to strike about getting that balance between those two things at the right sort of tempo, as it were.
Speaker B
I learned something 2008, installing the big exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. And I for the first time grouped works a little bit in rooms and there was a room devoted to the early black and white photocopies from the late 80s mixed with a newer large scale photocopies from the 2000s. And then a room where maybe for the first time in a museum, the lighter, the folded abstract, yet completely concrete yet because they're folded paperworks were and paper drop works and then Views from Above and Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions. And I realized people felt a difference. And I think as a viewer, you want to feel something as in like, aha. I've moved from this to that and that. I had a show touring exhibition in the US 2006-2008, just preceding this Hamburger Bahnhof show. It started with a vast show at MCA Chicago and it Was somehow like all over the place, literally. And I don't mean it badly, like I felt it all, but it wasn't clear enough to the viewer, like what zones, how they develop. And of course, it doesn't mean that I'm now sorting things by subjects or by chronology, but dealing with the space at the Pompidou, for example, there is, for example, one wall near the entrance that has light temperature as an underlying theme, which you wouldn't necessarily see, but I was thinking about LED lighting and incandescent lighting, yet there was a big purple abstraction at the heart of it. So if I think about something when making a wall that creates a coherence that the viewer can feel. And then it's not like with all works of art, you don't have to fully understand them literally. You know what. What matters is that you sense the artist's inquiry, a sense of interest. That. Yeah, that somebody's interested in something that's fascinating.
Speaker C
In your one of your songs, which is called We're Not Going Back, there's a lovely line and an important line, it seems to me, which is treating things radically, equally. And it seems to me that that might be, in a way, a kind of motto for many more things than thinking about the world in a political sense, and so on, in a way, a way of thinking about your work too. Because it seems to me that's what you have done all the way through your career, that you are treating every body of work radically. There's an equal radicalness to everything. Can you say more about that line? Is that something that you perceive as a kind of almost a manifesto or motto?
Speaker B
I mean, great that you pick. Picked that up. Because I like the line because it comes across as sort of a side thought, I think. Exactly. There is a real challenge to it because we all are easily talking about equality or, you know, saying, like, I'm not a racist, for example, and then, you know, I treat everybody equally. You know, we make sort of assumptions and statements. But to actually do this task that should be at the core of being human, to really wholeheartedly do it, is a challenge. And if we don't accept it, that how challenging it is, how unequal we constantly judge the world and how unequal we judge disasters in different parts of the planet. If we don't accept that. That we are never really the master of it, you're kind of pretending a strength that isn't a real strength. And I think in acknowledging all our weakness in it and our failure in treating things as potentially equal, you Know, obviously not everything is equal because, you know, like, red is not equal. Green. Right. So it's the potentiality of things that are equal that I'm interested in. And that's what I also meant, Even with the 2003 title of the Tate Britain Show. If one thing matters, everything matters. Not that, just so this understanding, if one thing can cause my heart to swing, then something else will have the same potential. But it was sometimes misunderstood as if I. That everything is the same.
Speaker C
Yeah. And that's a very important distinction. But it seems to me like the. For instance, your work with magazines is an example of where you have approached your work with an unorthodoxy and said, I know this feels right and I'm gonna pursue it. Because I believe that you were told, when you were studying, no, you give up the magazine work because that's not art photography.
Speaker A
Right.
Speaker B
I mean, I was. I was lucky that I didn't study art photography. I was doing a more vocational course which didn't have any direction in terms of what photography would be applied to. But I learned early on that the simultaneity of my interest in the printed page as much as in the gallery wall was somehow deemed not really acceptable, not really conventional. And. And that somebody who publishes in a magazine and exhibits must certainly first have worked for magazines and then climbed up to be shown in galleries. And that was, for me, never the case because I actually actively chose the magazine as a venue, as a place to put my pictures in, but also to put my energy in, because I. I felt that they were vital places that were talking about things that mattered to me and they had the distribution that some art venues could only dream of.
Speaker C
Yeah, it's a way of reaching a much broader audience and perhaps an audience that might be disarmed as well, or experience something unexpected. And you talk about emotion and I think about seeing those spreads, seeing those, those photographs as a kind of visceral shock.
Speaker B
I mean, I never fundamentally questioned it because I felt this is all paper, you know, like it all came from those early photocopies and the translation of the visual three dimensional world into two dimensions, including words and thoughts. I mean, how they end up in pictures or words, actually. I mean, words have played a role in my work throughout. But, yeah, this hierarchy I was sort of challenged by for a long time, like when I won the Turner Prize, Matthew Collins famously said, I don't even know why he's an artist. Or was it Brian Sewell, one of the two? But they both liked the fact that I worked for magazines. And that some of these photographs at the Turner Price show had also appeared in magazines disqualified the whole project. And that's kind of shocking. But I also, you know, we've come a long way, baby. 25 years. You know, I just picked up, like, we use magazines as paperweights for the large inkjet prints to flatten out before installing them. And every museum, every gallery, gives me different printed matter to weigh them down. And I got a stack of old art magazines from the 2000s, and I saw a copy of an art review from 2008, Power 100, and I thought, interesting, just how. How different it was. And that time that year, people also thought, we are really at it and we are really in it and we are on it, on top of it. And, and, and you look at it now and, and of course you think, well, I mean, of course we were fully living our lives. But, yeah, you never know.
Speaker C
Yeah, what's coming next?
Speaker B
What's coming next? And any kind of certainties, like. But the certainties of the great art world is so interesting how that was such a limited representation.
Speaker A
Absolutely.
Speaker C
Yeah. Yeah. And one of the ways, and I use these terms approvingly, and I know, I think you did when you first used them, but it seems to me that the magazines is an example of, I think, what you've called impure or contaminated, this idea that there are kind of actually radical devices that one can use in order to connect with people and that can be in the presentation of the photographs or in where they're displayed or whatever that actually can actually give your work an effect that transports it to a different place and to a different audience and so on.
Speaker B
Something which I notice increasingly is needing qualification, because today a magazine plays a very different role than 25 years ago. And the way that it was a conduit, that was partially unavoidable, you know, because now it's really like a pure choice to pick up a magazine, whereas 25 years ago, magazines were somehow definitely a part of people's life. You know, if you wanted to know what's in the cinema, you would pick up Time out or something like that.
Speaker C
That's very true.
Speaker B
And so, you know, like us two talking would be easy to talk about magazines as this sort of fabled medium of also democracy that. That it might have been. But now we need to also qualify that it may now be different media that play that role. And of course, also maybe there's not similar media that play that role because you're not even free to see, to choose a Type of media that gives you the variety of input that maybe in the past media had. Because now it's everything is channeled to your exact assumed taste. Nobody really knows what that taste really is. But everybody acts as if they can tailor made it and target it to you.
Speaker C
Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Who was the first artist whose work you loved?
Speaker B
Kurt Schwitters. You know, when I looked at the questions, in the end I stopped at the word loved. And so that I would say is Kurt Schwitters. Whereas who influenced you or who you even who met your eye? I had to think about interestingly, about somebody who I never mentioned before. It's actually Victor Vasarelli and Albrecht Durer. The hair, a print of the hair was hanging in my room as a child. And Vasarelli print, who was of course super popular in the 70s, at least in West Germany. And I know that my mother, I think she came back from a holiday in. In France and bought these Vasarelli prints and. And super glossy prints.
Speaker C
And they were put in your room and you just sort of absorbed them.
Speaker B
I think each one of us three kids had one in our room and they just stood for a modernity like this is now. There's nothing of the past in here that felt really exciting that my parents would bring something like this when they were otherwise completely against anything particularly progressive and modern. You know, listen classical music. That was still the time when there was a complete divide between parents and kids. What they listened to, what they liked. They didn't like anything shared. But this basraeli thing felt wow, they are into. They also see an attraction in that. So this span, this Durer was more significant of my time and could have happened in. In any kind of setting. I guess many, you know, not wasn't a privileged setting to a particular. You know, my parents weren't art aficionados as such, but. But the Schwitters thing was maybe really also like a discovery. Somebody who I found, who I embraced, who I thought these words, paintings, drawings, you know, like. Like to write down sounds that nonsense deeply spoke to me.
Speaker C
That's fascinating. Were you by that stage that you saw Schwitters thinking about being an artist as a thing? Were you entertaining the idea that art might be an avenue for you?
Speaker B
That was when I was 17 and I had this lucky coincidence that I was not good in art class in school. I wasn't naturally talented in drawing and neither in music. So I wasn't recognized. Oh, he's gonna Be the artist. And that was really freeing. And so I acted like an artist from relatively early age because in the, in my shows, you know, works date back to when I was 16, 17, 18, and they are valid pieces. Yet at the time I saw them as very meaningful to me. But it wasn't until I was 20 and had moved to Hamburg that I mustered up the courage to go to the local arty gay lesbian cafe and ask for if I could show them my work for an exhibition. So it was just very lucky that I didn't get crushed by the fear of not fitting in, of not getting into art school, and was able to form my own language with materials also that weren't even considered fine art materials.
Speaker C
Do you think Schwitters was influential then, on the approaches, those photocopy works? The idea of, you know, manipulating images, blowing them up, forging a language from images that you're manipulating in that way.
Speaker B
Yeah. And forging images from something that's considered wildly unartistic, you know, like in his case, cut up newspapers, or in my case Xerox's photocopy paper. But, but like the appreciation for newspapers was deeply felt by me. It wasn't learned. So seeing Schwitters, I recognized something in me, in him.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
And I saw the radicality of presenting these cut up bits of tickets and newspapers glued together as art at a time when other people must have thought this is just nothing like why.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
And it's often a little bit surprising in hindsight, you know, when you know that this happened 100 years ago, that people then 60 years ago did the same thing when somebody else printed like say a silkscreen print of Elvis Presley on a canvas and said, why? Why is this art?
Speaker C
Yes. So true. Which historical artist do you turn to the most today?
Speaker B
Francisco de Zoboran. In equal measure I could mention Caravaggio. I mean, Caravaggio, of course, has a much broader scope in what his work touches and brings to motion in contemporary heads. Many people feel connected to it, connected to it. And Zobaran is kind of a specialization because, I mean, they don't share that much, but there is like a light and the physicality in the portraiture is connected. But the highlight in Soberhan is this humility of the figures depicted. Often of course, monks who have like a super touching realism and sort of deep spirituality, which is also a bit hot. And I was just in Sao Paulo for the Biennale and at the Must.
Speaker C
Be museum, the amazing museum.
Speaker B
Where they have this one Salle exposition that is showing the entire art history that they own in one progression from 1300 to 2025, all pictures displayed on glass carriers standing in the space. And I was amazed to see that they have a Zobaran and this monk who I had a bit of an encounter with.
Speaker C
How wonderful. It's crazy because you're talking about Zubaran and these monks with these habits on, and they're in their faces, sort of shrouded, actually, in darkness and so on. Behind you is one of your paper drop works. And I'm suddenly seeing Zuberan in the paper drop, you know, in that sort of wonderful dark space. Space that. This sort of almost indeterminate space that opens up in the paper drops, you know, the fold of Zurbrand's drapery.
Speaker B
It is true. I mean, it's. It's really like he. One could call him the master of the hoodie.
Speaker C
That's true.
Speaker B
But you know, the other thing, of course, that really touched me are his still lives.
Speaker C
Yeah, that's wonderful.
Speaker B
His only three of them. He made, I think, think four or five.
Speaker C
Yeah. There was something that you said which I thought was really striking and I think, again, really important, which is that you said about the club photographs that you've taken, that Gale Gross would have painted this if he were alive at this moment. I think the important point you were making there was acid house clubs, raves, all of that seen in Britain and across Europe, was a political movement, movement as well as a social movement. Right. And it seemed to me that was really important. And I wondered that you said that must have meant that you must have looked quite a lot at the Expressionists and the Neuesachlichkeit growing up.
Speaker B
You said Gross, as in George Gross?
Speaker C
Yeah, George Gross, the first Gale. George Gross.
Speaker B
Yes, yes. I mean, Neue Sachtliskeit as a thing even didn't initially strike me as much as maybe with the exception of Christian Shard, the portraitist from the 1920s, who I also discovered at Sprengel Museum in Hanover, where I traveled to see the 100th birthday exhibition of Kurt Schwitters. That was my first art travel that I really was so compelled as 17 or so to go, but to understand the full extent of the Enlightenment that then broke itself. Place and space. First. So realism, Kobe, and then new objectivity. How radical. All of that was only dawned on me more in later years when I was a fully formed artist, because I guess when I grew up, I was in a fully modernist world, you know, like post war Germany was, you know, fully embraced modernism and modernity and the twenties the third, the. Well, not so much the thirties, but I mean, the interesting thing is, of course also not completely separable, not like what turned into fascism and what turned into peaceful exploration of modern and objectivity thought.
Speaker C
Which contemporary artist do you most admire?
Speaker B
I think the answer is easy because it would be easy to say, oh, there are many. And I don't know what who to say, but consistently, Isa Genskan blows my. My mind. We first met a few days before my opening of my first exhibition at Daniel Buchholz in cologne in January 93.
Speaker C
Wasn't she the first person to buy one of your works?
Speaker B
Yes, exactly. So she came in and Daniel had shown her since 86 already several years. And she came by and had a look around and was curious. And then out of the blue she said, I want to buy this print this photograph. And then three or four days later she said, she asked me, do you know why I want this one? And I said no. And she said, man musti dinger auf die Spitzer. You have to drive things to the summit, to the peak of a mountain. And the photograph was of. Was Alex and Lutz looking at crotch, where you see the torso, nude torso of a woman, Alex. And Lutz is bending over, holding onto her leg and looking between her legs and crotch. And in a sort of playful encounter, understanding of the other sex of a friend of ours, our bodies. And this sort of playful exploring, what it feels like to be in our bodies was of like real central importance at the time. And for her to pick that up, up as a. As sort of this act of transgression without any victims, there's no one hurt. It was just, you know, But. But it still of course had shock value to many.
Speaker C
Well, so shocking that when the magazine that carried them was produced, is it right, the distributors would refuse to stock it, refuse to put it out effectively, yes. So that series of photographs of Alex and Lutz, who were your best friends, you know.
Speaker B
Yes. And we. I mean, we photo. I photographed it a year before. I put it then into this series of pictures of Lutz and Alex. It's a testimony also to the times, those very early 90s. I'm sometimes thinking about what there was a sense of rebellion, of wanting to say something and feeling able to say something because we felt it is our right to demand change and progress in a way that today I sometimes feel like, because we are faced by a pendulum that's swinging backwards, whereas in the early 90s we felt part of a pendulum that swung forward. Now I would feel like sometimes oh, you know, like maybe don't brush against the grain, don't ruffle feathers. Don't, you know, do we want to make people angry or do they just because they see one shocking picture, they judge 100 other ones only under that that light. Right. So there was something very open at that time.
Speaker C
But since then you and either collaborated you. I mean right at the start in 93 you did the atelier project and then you went and did a show together and so on. So it's been a really productive mutual admiration there.
Speaker B
Yes, no, it's been really great. And because of course when somebody you admire admires you back, that's kind of the litmus test that I've wanted to I've so many times in Those life last 30 plus years felt that okay, like if she thinks it's cool, then it might might be cool.
Speaker A
A brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture platform. Bloomberg Connects offers access to more than 1100 cultural organizations through a single click. New guides are added regularly and among the latest is a new guide for free sculpture 2025, which runs until 2nd November and for which Bloomberg Connects is the official digital guide. If you explore Bloomberg Connects, you'll find a number of institutions that have had major presentations of Wolfgang Tillman's work, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Tate and the Serpentine in London, the National Museum of Art in Osaka in Japan and the Biennale so Paulo in Brazil, whose 36th edition in 2025 features the an installation by Wolfgang. In the guide to the Biannual on Bloomberg Connects, you can read about the concept behind the exhibition, which is called Not Every Traveller Walks the Roads on Humanity as a Practice and is curated by a team led by the general curator Bonaventure so Beijing en Nicu, you can discover all of the artists in the exhibition, which along with Wolfgang, includes the former guests on this podcast, Lynn Hirschman, Leeson, Oscar Murillo, Otterbomb and Kangaroo and Nary Ward. And see in which of the exhibition's six chapters they feature to explore digital guides to all the partnering institutions. Download the app today. It's available from the App Store and Google Play, and you can keep up to date by following Bloomberg Connects on Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker C
What do you have pinned to your studio wall?
Speaker B
A card of the the most recent Between Bridges exhibition, which is this green foam fog with the word Spanish for hallucination printed in red on it. And then when on closer inspection, you see it's a Car that burned tires caused this green fog. And it's from the Colombian artist Sophia Reyes. And I invited her to do an exhibition at the Adelbert Strasse space in. In Berlin for Between Bridges. And this is maybe no coincidence that I like having a word in front of me, because words are fascinating, like this Spanish word, alucinacion, like, even what happens, like all these different movements of tongue in three different languages and how our brain sees that in the shape. Shape of ink on paper and translates it into a sound and movement of lips and tongue. That's endlessly fascinating for me.
Speaker C
Yeah. And walking around your Pompidou exhibition, I was really conscious how much words have come to the fore. There was this wonderful thing, a kind of rhythm through the show, which I think you call time mirrors or time mirrored.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker C
Which it seemed to me, again, very important in the general thesis, if you like, of your work, this idea of elasticity of time, but also relativity of time. And that's sort of very present in the way that you display the work, but also within the work itself. So. And you did that through words, explaining to us what happened at certain point in the past in relation to now and in the future. Do you think words have become increasingly important as a language to you alongside and within the photography?
Speaker B
Yes, in the way that they are pictures, that they are these shapes. Text often is a shape on the page and in an inverse direction, I called a portfolio I made for Aperture magazine in New York in 2019, photographs words. And that was 2019. I guess, increasingly we can answer this. Yes, words are pictures, and few things go into the brain like, I mean, like language. So, I mean, this may sound too generalized or simplistic, but I think it is fascinating to see certain sentences, to see language spelled out in front of you. And one text work that I First made in 2017 functions particularly like that. That is goes, how likely is it it that only I'm right in this matter?
Speaker C
That's such a powerful body of work. Yeah.
Speaker B
And, yeah, as a sort of spoken sentence, it goes in, but it doesn't sort of maybe hit so deep. But when you read it in front of you, and you read it one word by one word, you know, how likely is it that only I'm right in this matter? You realize just how ridiculous it would be to just assume that your own position is the only one out of seven billion. That is right. And so, yes, language is a increasing area of work for me.
Speaker C
Indeed.
Speaker A
Which museum do you visit most frequently?
Speaker B
These questions you distribute to your Conversation partners. And I'm sure many, many of us want to appear specialist and interesting and off the beaten track and, and. But I just wrote down moma, Tate, Neue National Galerie, and I thought, I mean, this sounds really non specific, but.
Speaker C
They'Re great museums, you know.
Speaker B
Exactly. And you know, that's the thing, like, I like to. Yeah. Like, for example, do justice to your question and first see what happens if I answer it honestly, rather than immediately think of like, what quirky museum could I mention to make me sound more interesting? When in fact. No, the reality is that probably in my lifetime, it's certainly Tate. It is an incredible institution, incredible set of museums. But together with moma and Neue National Gallery, the three of them in the last five, six or so years have been able to make a transition to representation art in this world in a way that is trying to do justice to the current picture. The landscape hasn't changed so much. But like I mentioned, art review power 100 from 2008 with like 99% white Western players. Yeah, they are great museums. And because they're so exposed, it's easy to also criticize them. And no one is perfect. But I have great admiration for what they do and how interesting and close to what is happening now in different scenes in different parts of the world they are. That wasn't normal, you know, 15 years ago. Even 15 years ago, museums of that caliber would not have even shown a Guerrilla Girls poster, you know. Now, of course, you know, you see a Guerrilla Girls poster in, in every museum and in the bookshop, and that's great. And you know, it's easy to say, oh, it's now, it's too many, but excuse me, like there's still work to.
Speaker C
Be done in that area. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah. Are you a grazer of those museums or do you make a beeline for particular works?
Speaker A
If you can.
Speaker C
Do you have different kind of modes of visiting museums?
Speaker B
Definitely. You know, like there, there are of course, special exhibitions, visits, and then of course, the great gift of visiting your own city with a visitor and being able to see a place, you know, through different eyes and seeing a collection afresh.
Speaker A
Yeah, absolutely. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?
Speaker B
Yeah, these questions are really pretty tuned, full volume, like, can you please say something that changed the way you see the world? I guess you, you had an idea when formulating them and yeah, it's of course clear that not a single event. No, sorry, what am I saying? Of course, for other people, there very well may have been moments of total earth shattering 180 degrees transformation. But for me, what immediately came to mind was the Laurie Anderson concert on the 24th of May, 1986 at the Hammersmith Odeon.
Speaker C
Love that you know the exact date.
Speaker B
Because I, I found the cassette on my ipod, so to speak. I digitized my tapes and I did bootleg the concert at the time with a little eyewear recording Walkman. And I listened to it forever and I wrote on it the date. So that's why the date. How extraordinary.
Speaker C
Well, the amazing thing to me is that Laurie Anderson had an absolute monster hit in the 1980s with Osuperman in 1980. Yeah. But I think one of the things about that period is that art and music was so adjacent. And that was, it seems to me, tremendously important to you. It was certainly for me too, that, you know, the art and music was. Were so bound up with each other. And it seems to me a really productive thing for you that that was the case.
Speaker B
Because I wasn't in the art or music scene at the time. I was an onlooker. I can't tell what it really was like. I was recently in conversation with Joel Vacheron, a Swiss researcher from Lisbon, and he spoke about Herbie Hancock and the song rocket from 1983 and how the COVID art was a particular art of the time that, yeah, like music philosophy and the thinking about data and all of it somehow was very connected. And what was so incredible was that this then ended up occasionally in the top 10 or in the top 30s and ended up on the. The German music television one hour music video program a week. Now we had one hour a week like the British Top of the Pops, but only videos, so. And you saw specks of high New York downtown art via a pop video on your screen in a small town in Germany.
Speaker A
Wonderful.
Speaker C
Absolutely formative.
Speaker A
Which writers or poets do you return to?
Speaker B
I read a lot, but not that many books. And the person who I return to the most is Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher who was a spiritual guiding light in the 60s, 70s, 80s. But he would probably have even rejected that term guiding because he never wanted to become a guru. He was completely rejecting organized religions and was encouraging a spirituality that is not following learned rules of behavior. Because he says the moment even you do a practice of meditation, you are only showing these acts of meditation to yourself or others. And it's really only a signaling, like an early criticism of virtue signaling.
Speaker C
It was performative, in other words.
Speaker B
Exactly. He was criticizing all religion as performative, including even yoga which is interesting.
Speaker C
But he was tremendously important, wasn't he, in the piece called the Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religion that you made in 2006? Is it right that his philosophy informed that piece?
Speaker B
I don't think directly, but I was maybe delving into his work the deepest at that time, as well as Quaker texts, and I was also reading at the time and this sort of understanding of organized religions. You know what? Actually, you're right, because he would speak about organized religions like that's not even like a term we normally use so much, is that that as a whole is sort of a thing humans do that one can be, as a whole, deeply critical of. Because it is all just many, many different performative acts across the globe, across centuries, that all have to do with the fact that we don't know where we come from and we don't know who we are. Which is actually a great Laurie Anderson line.
Speaker C
That's true, absolutely. I want to read back to you a lovely quote. Quote, which is actually, you wrote it for your Pompidou catalogue. Aside from their civilizational significance, books are sensual objects, a pleasure to hold, to weigh, to smell, to live with. They're a point of connection, a bridge to other human beings. I really felt that in the Pompidou show that it was, as well as an exhibition of your work, a show about books and their meaning and their importance to us. Obviously, you were in a library, but the books were a kind of guiding force through that show, right?
Speaker B
Yes. I mean, to just say yes feels like not entirely true, because in the center of that first third, because it's sort of the space was divided by like a third and two thirds, a big firewall. The only structural wall in the entire building is there were firewall with a huge gate in it which has rolling shutter gates in case of fire. And in the center of that first third were five tables, which I called decades tables, devoted to the 2000s tens, zeroes and 1990s and 80s. And three of these five decades for me, I represented with a book each. And so I did put books in the center because it is a big junction point. For me to be invited to exhibit in a former library wasn't just a structural architectural challenge and invitation, but it really was about thinking about the library that lived there, when all the three years that I worked on planning the show was also looking like, what? What are these books that have meant so much in my life and the magazines and the newspapers that are shown there and the hundreds of periodicals that are Kept there. And so, yes, the library features across.
Speaker C
The exhibition, there was one really wonderful bit among many, many wonderful bits. But I was really moved, actually, that there were 66 copies of Concord, your series. It's a book project. Yeah. And each individual spread was from a. Rather than just taking out one disassembled copy or whatever. And I love that it was an artist book and you saw each spread within the book. So the object was so important. That seemed to be an amazing feat.
Speaker A
Did you borrow.
Speaker C
Or were they all from your own collection?
Speaker B
I'm very happy you picked up on how extraordinary that table actually is. Not. Because many probably just thought, yeah, this is 128 pages you look at. But few people probably have thought about the physical reality that you can only show 128 pages when you have 64 of the same book, plus one for the COVID and one for the back cover. And I actually have that many copies in my archive. And so the idea came to me when thinking about the show and wanting to use these very large library tables, that Concorde, which is such an important work, also in the context of the Pompidou building, the time that it's from, which is kind of the same time, not kind of is exactly the same time as Concorde, but it's a Anglo French collaboration, which is also such a beautiful thing that the countries themselves couldn't do it, but together they could. And I like that the show spoke to some real nerdy tendencies in me. And. And I love that people picked up on. Well, actually, do you really have 66 copies of this book?
Speaker C
It was fantastic. What music or other audio do you.
Speaker A
Listen to while you're working?
Speaker B
Much less today than I used to. Which. Yeah. I don't know. Is it really the demise of the CD or the cassette? I mean, that I could have adapted to the last 20 years or 15 years. It's not that I constantly listen to music. That's what I want to say. And when I. When I. So rather than then think up something, find sort of an answer of some music that I, of course, do sometimes listen to. I found it more interesting for myself to say that, Yeah, I don't typically even listen to music when I work. That's interesting. Yet, of course, music is important in my life still.
Speaker C
Absolutely. I find it really amazing that. That it always was important. It's there right the way through. But there's this moment you have in, like, 2016, around 2016, where you start making music again. You made it as a teenager.
Speaker A
Right.
Speaker C
And then from 2016 onwards, you're a musician as well as an artist, you know, you go on Spotify people and you can hear Wolfgang's records. What was it that prompted that deep investment that is now absolutely a sort of parallel activity to the photography it.
Speaker B
Started in or it showed its first sort of signs in 14, 2014. But really when I look back in my notes, 2012, like this desire to reconnect to my performative side just grew and was partially, I think helped by me giving lectures, talks around like the late 2000s and throughout the the tens to growing numbers of audiences, sometimes 400, 500 did it talk in LA, 800 people. And I had observed that the way I spoke was sort of. I structured intuitively, experimenting with moments of silence and showing two or three slides without saying a word and then saying a lot about one slide and then the next a little bit. And these talks, I noticed that even though they lasted 80 minutes, still people wouldn't go and wouldn't leave. There wasn't anybody leaving, there wasn't shuffling in the room, you know, you know, when an audience gets twitchy. And so I think there was this thing that I realized these talks became actually kind of 80 minute performance and then this sort of speaking and then the understanding of language and that this is actually a thing, you know, which was maybe only a side thought, a background like a titling exhibition, Titling artworks, writing. And then I made a video called Instrument in which I'm playing with the shadow of myself, but by doing so I start hopping from one leg to the other which creates a beam. And then I kind of danced to this beat which I'm making. And so it's a kind of self feedback loop. And I called it instrument in 2014. And so there was like a. And anyway, by 2015, used a audio recording that I made in 2011, so they already recorded a printing press of a book printing, because I thought this machine sounded like a techno track. And I made a song out of those recordings called make it up as you go along and put that out together, combined with three tracks from 1986, 30 years earlier, which we restored in a studio in Berlin, Tricks Studios. And there was, and I never looked back. I didn't plan to keep releasing music. But now that there is a whole sort of catalog on Apple and Spotify, et cetera.
Speaker C
Indeed there is. And on vinyl and so on.
Speaker B
Yes.
Speaker C
What other media influence your work?
Speaker B
Shockingly little. I attribute that to the deep effect that films have on me, honestly, like when I watch a film in the cinema it so fully engulfs me. I mean, so my boyfriend will laugh because of. Because it says the first thing you do is fall asleep in it. But. But when I actually have watched it, I'm so totally in it and it goes so deeply in that I don't think I could watch a film every day. You know, like how people watch a film.
Speaker C
Real film buffs.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker C
Constantly filling themselves with new movies and so on.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker B
And so the films that I did watch and let in, they really often had profound influences, like Safe by Todd Haynes from 1995, or Happiness by Todd Haynes from 1998. And then the Fassbinder retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London in 99, 2000. That was a moment when I really went and saw like maybe 15 or 20 of them. And that was like getting to know a friend.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
And, you know, sometimes I feel like also with philosophers, I have a sense that there is a lot in it for me, but maybe that's exactly also why I don't need to read it all.
Speaker C
Yes.
Speaker B
Like in the mid-90s, there was. Jacques Lacan, was very en vogue. And I sensed, and I learned from Johan, my partner at the time, a lot about it. And I sense that there is a resonance of that in my own understanding. But I felt it was okay to not actually maybe over inform myself.
Speaker A
That's interesting.
Speaker C
Is there a particular discipline in your daily working life that you see as an essential ritual?
Speaker B
It's a nap.
Speaker C
Not in the cinema always.
Speaker B
It's an afternoon nap that can sometimes be even as late as 6 or 7pm and I found that 23 minutes is a great time that works for me. And so I put it on my phone. 23 minutes timer.
Speaker C
Wow.
Speaker B
And I press start and I put the phone on my belly. And just that weight is a little bit like a. A tiny bit of a duvet, a little bit of a cover, and maybe a T shirt or something over my eyes. And. And I can do that anywhere, on any floor, in any place.
Speaker C
That's amazing. And. And will you work either side of that? Will it renew you with energy to work? And therefore, you know, are you. Are you a nighttime worker, as it were, as a. You know, do you work best in evenings or.
Speaker B
I'm. And fortunately, unfortunately, both. You know, I'm actually a real good morning person. But then now, since I was a late teen, I worked also creatively at night. And of course they are a little bit mutually exclusive when you push it too late. And I guess the nap or two, usually one for me is like a complete rewire of the. The brain. And I'm. And it's this sort of dipping in, which is, I guess, the key of not falling asleep completely, but. So I never feel dizzy afterwards, but I feel a great sense of clarity.
Speaker A
If you could live with just one.
Speaker C
Work of art, what would it be?
Speaker B
I guess I don't want to take anything from other collections that I don't own. So if I have to choose from what I live with and I had to run out of the house, I think I would take the small 20 by 25 centimeter painting of a tomato on a plate by Poltek, which was part of his Venice Biennale installation in the 1970s. Amazing he had. The room was lined with a lionel of small paintings, each having a little lamp above them. And in 2000, I bought it at an art fair. It just spoke to me. I mean, Poltech was a very strong figure. When I came into the art world in 93, 92, my dealer in Cologne, gallerist Daniel Buchos, and his partner at the time, Gregorio Magnani, had curated work of Poltech. And yeah, it was like a. It's this discovering soul sisters, soul brothers through decades and history, which is a fascinating thing about art and sort of keeping the memory of earlier generations alive whilst being nurtured by others, having kept memories of earlier generations alive. That's sort of a beauty of what we do.
Speaker C
Indeed. And lastly, what is art for?
Speaker B
Art allows us to see ourselves differently. I just wrote that earlier because initially I also thought of the term useless, which I sometimes say in a statement about the importance of art and the freedom of art, is that it's useless in the way that it doesn't have use. You cannot take shelter under it from rain, you cannot eat it. Bread or an umbrella is practically more useful. But this exact power of art that stems from its extracting itself from reason, reasonability from, you know, you should be doing this. But no, there's something in us that wants to do that. And what. What is so giving about it is that I think that it allows us to view ourselves differently. And that is of course, something that is deeply uncomfortable, disconcerting or liberating. And it could be a party, it could be a riot, it could be, you know, however much you want to get out of your beaten track. Or it could be a very humble, silent moment of contemplation where you just sort of maybe hold on and rather than constantly talk and shout and maybe see, maybe this could be all different. And that is what art can do.
Speaker A
Wolfgang, thank you so much.
Speaker B
Thank you, Vince.
Speaker A
Wolfgang Tielman's Build from Here is at Maureen Paley in London from 3 October until 20 December. His exhibition Auschellung in Rimscheid is at the House Clef in Rimscheid In Germany until 4 January 2026, the 36th Biennale Sao Paulo. Not every traveller walks the roads on humanity's A Practice continues until 11 January 2026. Fictions of display is at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los angeles, also until 4 January 2026. Kunt er noch Kunst Undemocratie is at the Konigsklasse in the Schloss Herrenkiempsee in Munich until 12 October 2025. On view. Begenungen mit dem Fotografischen is at the Pinnacothek de Moderne in munich, also until the 12th of October. And that's it for this episode. Do subscribe wherever you're listening and give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. Please also subscribe to our sister podcast the Week in Art, a deep dive into the latest big art world stories, the top shows and the key issues every week. And subscribe to the art newspaper@theartnewspaper.com we're on Facebook, Instagram threads and Bluesky. Production, editing and sound design on A Brush with are by David Clack and the producer is Philippa Kelly. Thanks also to our Digital editor, Alexander Morrison, our Social editor Kelly Foster, and our designer Daniela Hathaway. A big thank you to Wolfgang Tillmans. Thank you for listening.
Speaker C
We'll see you next week. Bye for now.
Speaker A
A Brush with is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects. Explore Bloomberg Connects today and discover cultural institutions on demand.