Wolfgang Tillmans turns Dresden's Albertinum into "Space"

Following retrospectives in the USA and Canada, the internationally acclaimed photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has been invited by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) to occupy a large room at the Albertinum in Dresden. The show, entitled "Space" (March 8 to June 26), brings together around 200 photographs and video works, including new works that have never before been shown in a museum - abstract photography, portraits of contemporaries, friends, encounters, landscape images from series and temporary sculptures. It is the first museum exhibition in this form in Germany for 13 years, as the artist said the day before the opening.

Tillmans described its structure as "a performance", the title describing an expanse "against a narrowness" through the search for boundaries in today's world and a world that is somehow becoming more national. "The word evokes a certain universality of being human, of seeing and also of experience." His lifelong love of astronomy taught him how to see and the importance of precise observation.

Astronomy runs through the presentation

So the reference to the sky and stars, this entire science, runs through the presentation, from images from the Cern nuclear research center in Switzerland to phenomena such as the rare transit of Venus in front of the sun. The show ranges from various still lifes created in Africa to the latest images from a server farm in San Francisco, which "trace the materiality of our information society".

The exhibition is intended as an update of his work over the last ten years, although some of the pictures are much older. "It sometimes takes me a long time to really let it out, because it's too obvious, too striking for me," said Tillmans. In his work, he is always concerned with a "conclusive exploration, how can you record, what can you see and what can I translate into images, whether that is the full moon night on the Atlantic or the noise of a television without a broadcast signal".

Invitation to see

The Dresden exhibition is an invitation to "trust your eyes, to make up your own mind", said Tillmans. He created an artist's book as a catalog. It is based on a collection catalog of the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister from the GDR era, which the Remscheid native bought during a visit in 1998. "Karl Lohse is a discovery I made here, or the famous war triptych by Otto Dix, unique works," he said. "Paired with the old masters, it makes an enormous spectrum of time tangible."

Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the most important contemporary German artists. His pictures of the night and club scene and of pop culture celebrities made him famous. The photographer, who "Die Zeit" called the "most imaginative picture finder of the present day", has already been awarded the coveted Turner Prize, the Federal Cross of Merit and the Gosla Kaiserring, among others.