Wolfgang Tillmans
Photographs friends, still lifes, skies and abstractions, and pins them to the wall unframed.
Wolfgang Tillmans was born at Remscheid in Germany in 1968, studied in Bournemouth, and came to attention in the early 1990s photographing club culture and his own circle for i-D — pictures that looked casual and were not. He won the Turner Prize in 2000, the first photographer and the first non-British artist to do so. The work has expanded steadily to include still lifes, astronomy, portraits, printed matter, and camera-less abstractions made by manipulating light and chemistry directly on photographic paper. The installation is part of the practice: prints of wildly different sizes taped, pinned and clipped to the wall alongside framed ones.
How a work is presented is not incidental here, and it is the practical issue: some prints are intended to be shown unframed and taped, in stated sizes and editions, and framing or trimming one changes it. Editions vary widely, from small editions to unique pieces, and some images exist in several sizes as separate works. The large abstract works on photographic paper are unique or near-unique. Signature and edition are usually on the verso or on accompanying documentation, and the studio is the reference.
If you own a work by Wolfgang Tillmans
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.