“With the abstract pictures, I feel myself liberated from the obligation to represent – that compulsion to represent.”
—Wolfgang Tillmans

Presenting photography in its purest form, produced without a camera, subject or negative, Freischwimmer 104 is a monumental study of colour, both luminous and seductive. Belonging to Wolfgang Tillmans’ celebrated Freischwimmer cycle, with examples from the series held in the Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Tillmans challenges the boundaries between drawing, painting and photography, balancing chance and intent.

“[My works are] my resistance to feeling powerless against the falling apart of a world bent on reviving ideologies and erecting borders and barriers and fuelling hatred between people.”
—Wolfgang Tillmans

Alternating between exposure and concealment, carefully manoeuvring light across photographic paper in a dark room, Tillmans constructs his Freischwimmer series by using his hands as the brush: a mode of painting with light. As László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray had stripped the production of the image to its key components with their cameraless photograms, Tillmans’ clarifies the process further by removing the object and solely using light, paper and chemicals. A hybrid between the analogue and the digital, Tillmans then scans the small sheets of exposed photographic paper onto a computer, reproducing each image on a vast scale. A process inaugurated at the very outset of Tillmans’ career as the artist deliberately exposed the last frame on the roll resulting in an orange flare, Tillmans relinquishes a degree of control to the machine, transforming chance coincidences into a mode of abstract representation.

 

Conceived a year after the artist’s first retrospective at Tate Britain, Freischwimmer 104 is bodily as it is liquid. Beginning to work in more abstract processes from the turn of the twenty-first century, rippling water, delicate hairs, or muscle fibres might be revealed by the photograph’s soft ribbons. Initially commencing the series with a group known as Blushes, Tillmans engages with the interplay of the body and the more indistinct, images that might remind the viewer of his more intimate photographs of humans. A title that translates from German to ‘swimming freely’, Tillmans in his titling of the Freischwimmer group alludes to the formal fluidity of these diffuse, amorphous surfaces. Between smoke and water, substance and the immaterial, from the aqueous depths of Freischwimmer 104 Tillmans reveals indeterminate states that are both familiar and other-worldly, states that tantalisingly exist just beyond our perception.

 

Wolfgang Tillmans – 'What Art Does in Me is Beyond Words' | Artist Interview | TateShot

Collector’s Digest 

 

• Consistently pushing the boundaries and definitions of photography, Wolfgang Tillmans rose to prominence for his lively portraits of nightlife published in magazines like i-D during the 1980s and 1990s.
• The first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize in 2000, Tillmans has since received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2015: lauded as the most prominent photography prize internationally.
• Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, Tillmans is the only artist to have had solo exhibitions at both Tate Britain, in 2003, and Tate Modern, in 2017. Tillmans' recent significant retrospective To look without fear travelled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and finally the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art between 2022 and 2024.