The final exhibition at the Centre Pompidou before its planned five-year renovation called for something that would linger in memory for a long time. German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, whose work is primarily associated with photography – we all know his images from the cover of Frank Ocean’s Blonde album, Purple and i-D magazines, as well as the Vote Together campaign encouraging voting in the European Parliament elections – has taken over the second floor of the building, transforming it into a multi-channel system of words, images and sounds.

 

Tillmans: a quest across reality

 

What makes the world the way it is? Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) has been grappling with this question for forty years—on both macro and micro scales. He’s interested in what shapes collectives, as well as what moves the individual. Although the exhibition, whose title Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us suggests the vastness of a potential answer, is not a retrospective, it reveals the full spectrum of themes the artist has been consistently exploring for decades: culture, politics, science, technology, and identity. It also remains in direct dialogue with architecture. It also maintains a direct relationship with the architecture. The exhibition is located on the second floor of the Centre Pompidou – a space that usually serves as a library. The artist presents, among other things, thematically grouped photographs (although Tillmans often revisits the same subjects, his works do not form closed series; depending on the project, he arranges them in new constellations, allowing their meanings to shift with changing contexts), video and sound installations (Tillmans has been experimenting with sound since the 1980s, and his first album, 2016 / 1986 EP, was released in 2016), and archival materials: books from both the library’s collection and private archives, as well as magazine clippings – including those featuring his work and others documenting the broader socio-political context.Even though the sheer number and diversity of components might suggest a sense of excess or chaos, visiting Pompidou proves to be a cohesive and fluid experience. And this is no accident. Already in his first gallery exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne (1993), the artist juxtaposed exhibition prints with pages from i-D magazine presenting his photographs—thereby challenging hierarchies and the status of photography in the art world. Since then, meticulously constructed installations—each functioning as a source of knowledge in its own right—have become one of his hallmarks. Tillmans consistently seeks out unexpected relationships—not only between his own works, but also between a piece and the space it inhabits. He often places his photographs in spots typically ignored by conventional museum display logic—for instance, just below the ceiling or on a door. At the Pompidou, he offers a space where one can look, read, listen, sit, lie down, and walk. In this one original part of the Pompidou building preserved from the 1970s—which architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers had initially designed as an open structure without partition walls—the artist directs our attention to the ceiling, where laser projections are displayed, and to the floor, covered in an old, worn-out carpet that serves as a kind of witness to the place’s history. He confronts abstraction with figuration, digital technology with analog, and public interest with private intimacy. He constructs the whole in such a way that it’s hard to resist the impression that I’m not looking at individual works, but at a gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art that, through a multitude of artistic means acting upon one another, deciphers the complex, multilayered world around us.

 

The power of a single image

 

An exceptionally intelligent installation, connecting works from various periods of the photographer’s career, is stimulating—but not without its risks: it may draw attention away from the individual photograph. So I take a step back and ask myself: what is it that makes me, when looking at a single, isolated print—without knowing in advance who the author is—say: this is Tillmans? What determines his significance and the power of his impact? Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech 27 years before 1990. 27 years after 1990, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. – this note appears in one of the display cases. A simple sequence of dates becomes something more than an anecdote—it is an expression of a way of thinking about reality that simultaneously exposes its paradoxes and complexities. I find more texts like this throughout the exhibition, but these kinds of relationships—contrasts, similarities, points of contact—operate in Tillmans’ work not only on the level of written word or curatorial groupings, but within the single image as well. You can see it in the juxtaposition of potatoes and stones that share a similar shape and size; in the pairing of a subtle gesture with a powerful body; in colors that generate visual tension or remain in harmony; in the vertical and horizontal lines of architecture; or in a patch of open sky framed by the four walls of a concrete building. A calculated strategy? I think it’s more the result of a conscious attempt to understand what is happening on the other side of the lens. The artist knows what draws his interest—and that’s why he’s able to both precisely direct his frames and work with pure chance. Tillmans’ entire body of work is grounded in such a broad spectrum of themes that nearly anyone can find a point of resonance. Even if political activism has never moved us, even if the development of science or technology doesn’t strike us as fascinating—we still know how sensitive the skin on an earlobe can be. We know the intense scent of large raindrops on a warm day. We understand what a military parade in Moscow might symbolize. We remember what a naked body looks like. Tillmans says that photographing the nightlife in the 1990s — which ignited his artistic career — offered people a utopian ideal of togetherness. I think the great strength of his work lies in the fact that the world he presents—structured, immediate, visually seductive—helps cultivate that elusive sense of belonging even during the daytime.

 

Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until September 22, 2025.