Through June 11, London’s Tate Modern presents “Wolfgang Tillmans 2017,” a comprehensive exhibition that brings together the artist’s photography, video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music. Tillmans first gained widespread attention in the 1990s for images that captured everyday life and ordinary experiences; over time his work has continued to probe how events and sensations are transmitted and transformed by media, often moving toward abstraction to reveal deeper visual and cultural currents.
The show features Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I (2014), a piece that evolved from footage of an analogue television losing its signal, and Blushes (2000), created by exposing photographic paper to light and manipulating those effects without using a camera. Visitors will also find landscapes, portraits and still lifes that span Tillmans’s varied practice. Highlights include La Palma (2014), a large-scale seascape that emphasizes color and atmosphere, and selections from the Neue Welt series (2009–2012), which explore social and environmental themes through richly detailed imagery.
The installation is located on Level 3 of the museum in the Boiler House & Tanks Studio. The presentation assembles works across media to convey the breadth of Tillmans’s interests—how photographs and moving images register personal and collective experience, how printed matter and musical pieces extend photographic practice, and how curatorial strategies can become artistic gestures in their own right. Together, these elements create a layered experience that encourages close looking while also reflecting on the ways visual information is produced and circulated today.
Whether engaging with his more literal documentary pieces or his abstract experiments with light and process, viewers can trace Tillmans’s sustained concern with perception, representation and the material conditions of image-making. The exhibition’s arrangement across multiple formats highlights the artist’s belief that photography does not live in isolation but interacts with sound, print, installation and display to form meaning. This range makes “Wolfgang Tillmans 2017” a compelling survey of an artist who continues to expand the language of contemporary visual practice.