Hot on the heels of his mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain which closed in September, Wolfgang Tillmans opens a show at his New York gallery (until 6 December). It seems a shame for US audiences that the Tate show will not travel to this side of the pond, but Tillmans’s dealer Andrea Rosen assures us that a US museum show is in the works, with venues to be announced. This show, which focuses on recent work, is installed in typical Tillmans fashion, a seemingly breezy salon-style hang, with two large, framed unique inkjet prints (part of his recent abstract “Blushes” series). A significant accomplishment of the catalogue accompanying the Tate show was to prove, through a diagram penned by Tillmans himself, that his various types of pictures—abstract and the figurative, still life, etc.—are related in a tightly woven conceptual scheme. Tillmans’s photographs, which won him the Turner prize three years ago, the first given to a photographer, may be of banal subjects, but they are rigorously composed (right, “Conor, studio”).
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'What’s On: Wolfgang Tillmans'