[Winter 2024]
From Banal to Beautiful
By Jill Glessing
[Excerpt]
To Look Without Fear – the title of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans’s traveling exhibition presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario1 – is an invitation to look around us, unflinchingly, at the real world that we inhabit, an approach modelled throughout Tillmans’s career and evidenced by the work mounted here. The survey exhibition offers a sampling from his prodigious photography, video, and music output, covering a thirty-six-year period (1986 to 2022). Site-specific, the selection of works varies somewhat from venue to venue.2 In Toronto’s iteration an eclectic, and electric, array of over three hundred photographic images, along with video works and printed materials, sprawls throughout the museum’s entire fifth floor, lining its high walls, spilling into hallways, four smaller galleries, and a theatre.
Because Tillmans has engaged so closely with the world socially, politically, and through art, this chronological presentation functions something like a scrapbook – a record of his personal and aesthetic developments – and a time capsule tracking world events through those epochal years. The curatorial notes emphasize his relationship with the various alternative cultures with which he has been involved as well as developments in image and sound technologies…
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Wolfgang Tillmans, From Banal to Beautiful – Jill Glessing ]