FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424 Fax. (310) 276-7430
WOLFGANG TILLMANS
January 26 - February 23, 2002
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 5:00 pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 26 6-8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by German born photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans lives and works in London and was the winner of Britain's Turner Prize in 2000. Born in 1968, Tillmans has emerged as one of the most influential and innovative photographers of his generation. His photographs first appeared in the early 1990s in the pages of such magazines as i-D, Interview, Spex, and The Face. Tillmans has become known for his salon style hangings of bare photographic prints taped to the walls in groupings of images spanning portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, and abstractions -- from provocative images of sexual taboo to moments of classical beauty found in unusual or unlikely places. Tillmans views each exhibition as a site-specific installation, often addressing the exhibition space as a larger composition.
Tillmans is best known for his images of contemporary European youth describing a way of life defined by his generation. These portraits present the individual in a manner which unveils the rituals of pop or sub-culture and the mechanics of self-perception. While certain subjects recur throughout his work, Tillmans is continually evolving. His most recent body of work consists of semi-abstract photographs which arose from "mistakes" made in the darkroom. The resulting photographs depict abstract brushes of color across figurative imagery such as the landscape. Out of this process, Tillmans came to create purely abstract photographs made entirely in the darkroom through various methods of exposing photographic paper to light.
"Wolfgang Tillmans's photographs uncover and illuminate moments of beauty and desire: skies, stars, moon, eclipses, cityscapes from above, flowers, tomatoes, oranges, aubergines, peppers, dishes, clothes (uninhabited, draped), lovers, friends, young men, young women: dancing playing, having sex, being high, letting go, improvising, posing. In gallery and museum installations these images are combined and recombined in different sizes and print mediums to create giant, room-sized collages; in the more intimate scale of Tillmans's books they are intercut with one another to become something like the world-embracing, onrushing catalogues of poets like Walt Whitman or Frank O'Hara, or the epiphanies and 'moments of being' of Virginia Woolf. Tillmans is highly sensitive to the physical status of the photograph as an artefact on paper, yet his aim is to 'peel away' any sense of artifice in the image itself in order to 'make the photograph disappear and leave the viewer alone with what I've been looking at'."
(Nathan Kernan. Wolfgang Tillmans: Moments of Being.
Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. 2000.)
Tillmans' work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Numerous books of Tillmans' photographs have been published. The most recent monographs are: View from above - Wolfgang Tillmans published last year by Hatje Cantz in conjunction with an extensive survey exhibition organized by the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and Portraits - Wolfgang Tillmans published by Walther Konig in Cologne.
An opening reception for Wolfgang Tillmans will take place on Saturday, January 26th at Regen Projects from 6:00 - 8:00 pm. For further information please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at 310/276-5424.