Puzzle of frowns and smiles with Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans occupies the heights of contemporary fine art photography. His work is admired and awarded for its surprising twists and turns, the beauty of his large painterly canvases and the punkish unpredictability of every show — all of which can also raise puzzled frowns. This retrospective, spanning the late Eighties to the present, will probably draw both reactions.
Tillmans is an innovator who explores and savours the world around him, experiments with production processes — he still prints his own work — and creates some magnificent imagery. He also revels in rule-breaking, typically mixing snaps of family and friends, mostly unframed and hung with Sellotape, alongside large, meticulously printed abstracts, figurative and conceptual works. In his hobby as a DJ, he plays a similar trick, interrupting a homogenous flow with an incongruous surprise track.
The exhibition is heavily autobiographical and includes his famous parties, still lifes and elegant portraits of young male friends. Dan (2008), naked and with skin like marble, is a homoerotic idyll, posed like a classical Greek discus thrower.
The opening room typically mingles the unframed amateur style with large, well-printed images: egg boxes disturbed by an over-exposed blast of light; a tender portrait of baby Roy 2009, asleep in a car seat; and Tillmans’s high-priced signature paper drop (Roma) 2007, whose sensual, sculptural shape created from folded paper suggests Man Ray.
Such links to the legends of photography and painting are irresistible, but never suggest plagiarism. In the long gallery, his other familiar series, Urgency (2004 and 2006), is a collection of large, beautifully minimal abstracts, related to Cy Twombly’s paintings.
Vast pale surfaces shimmer with delicate patterns created from pink sprays of colour seeping through liquid. The magnificent Ostgut Freischwimmer is an indigo sweep of waves marking a swimmer’s slow progress, hair waving and currents depicted through calligraphic strokes, photographically. Tillmans interrupts them with grainy black and white prints of builders on scaffolding — the Abba trick again.
From a similar period, but more provocatively uninteresting, is the Lighter series (2007-10) — squares of shiny printing paper hung in careful patterns and, from a distance, resembling floor tile samples. Close to, though, I’m drawn to the textures.
That leaves the surprising image, small, sculptural and hung high: a naked man’s genitals, from below. That guaranteed frowns and smiles.
Until September 19. 020 7402 6075, serpentinegallery.com
Wolfgang Tillmans
Serpentine Gallery
