Wolfgang Tillmans - Contemporary Art Evening London Thursday, February 11, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited


    View from above: Wolfgang Tillmans: Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 28 September 2001 – 13 January 2002; Castello di Rivolli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 10 February – 5 May 2002; Paris, Palais de Tokyo, 8 June – 15 September 2002; Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 11 October 2002 – 19 January 2003 (another format exhibited)

  • Literature

    Z. Felix, ed., View from Above: Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostfildern, 2001, p. 25 and cover (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans is a trendsetting photographer whose oeuvre refuses any signature subject or style. His compelling images range from the transgressive to the banal, illustrating a real feeling of modern life. The present lot, Untitled (Las Vegas) from 2000, is one of his largest and most powerful photographs from a widely exhibited and acclaimed body of work entitled A View from Above. Using a wide aperture and no depth of field, Sin City’s glowing grid set against an early evening sky is captured from a scratched aeroplane window. The beautiful urban nightscape is broken up by a series of gleaming lines and marks spread across the picture’s surface like the slashing, gestural brushstrokes of an abstract painter.
     
    “In my work, there is an underlying approach that I hope gives everything I make a cohesion. I trust that, if I study something carefully enough, a greater essence or truth might be revealed without having a prescribed meaning. I’ve trusted in this approach from the start, and I have to find that trust again and again when I make pictures. Really looking and observing is hard, and you can’t do it by following a formula. What connects all my work is finding the right balance between intention and chance, doing as much as I can and knowing when to let go, allowing fluidity and avoiding anything being forced.”
     
    (D. Eichler, ‘Look, again’, Frieze, 23 September 2008)

  • Artist Biography

    Wolfgang Tillmans

    German • 1968

    Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans has pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium. Challenging the indexical nature traditionally associated with photography, his abstract and representational photographic bodies of work each in their own way put forward the notion of the photograph as object—rather than as a record of reality. While achieving his breakthrough with portraits and lifestyle photographs, documenting celebrity culture as well as LGBTQ communities and club culture, since the turn of the millennium the German photographer has notably created abstract work such as the Freischwimmer series, which is made in the darkroom without a camera.

    Seamlessly integrating genres, subject matters, techniques and exhibition strategies, Tillmans is known for photographs that pair playfulness and intimacy with a persistent questioning of dominant value and hierarchy structures of our image-saturated world. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer to receive the prestigious Turner Prize.

    View More Works

39

(Untitled) Las Vegas

2000
Cibachrome print in the artist's frame.
171.5 × 145.1 cm (67 1/2 × 57 1/8 in).
Signed 'Wolfgang Tillmans' and numbered of one on the reverse. This work is from an edition of one plus an artist's proof.

Estimate
£30,000 - 40,000 ‡♠

Sold for £46,850

Contemporary Art Evening

12 Feb 2010
London