Collection

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) is a valued artist who influenced contemporary photography by introducing topics related to the club culture, underground fashion and subcultures. Tillmans’ output has also significantly changed the way photography is displayed by creating photographic installations composed of photographs of highly diversified formats, themes and production methods so as to encourage the viewer to move away and approach, bend and stand on their toes. The artist also creates installations in the form of photographic atlases (in the spirit of “Mnemosyne Atlas” by Aby Warburg), juxtaposing his own photographs, pictures from the Internet, press clippings and short texts. This brings him closer to the “archaeology of photography” propagated in Poland since the 1960s and in the 1990s presented within the theoretical framework by Jerzy Lewczyński. Tillmans uses various photographic conventions: still life, reportage, portrait, astrophotography, abstract, landscape, nature, fashion, documentary or nude photography. Their character results from the experience of living in a contemporary metropolis (some of the places Tillmans lived in include Hamburg, London, New York). In the new photographs, the artist uses the representations of nature and weather phenomena using them to render the turbulent nature of our times – social unrest, political and economic crises, ethnic and ideological antagonisms. The photograph of rough sea in the Museum collection is symptomatically entitled “The State We're In, A”. This is a unique print, existing in a single copy.