Wolfgang Tillmans valuation
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.
What a work by Wolfgang Tillmans is worth
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Bio
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.
Posters, exhibitions and the galleries
In April 2016 Tillmans designed a series of about twenty-five posters urging a vote to remain in the European Union and put them on his website for anyone to download and print, calling them open source. They were printed in large numbers and, like his exhibition posters, they are not editions. Tate Modern's exhibition in 2017, his first there, and the survey To look without fear at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 both gave a large share of the space to printed matter, publications and installation alongside the photographs.
For a photograph, the title, year, size and edition come from the gallery or the studio, and they are what place a print. His galleries include Maureen Paley in London, Galerie Buchholz in Germany and David Zwirner, and an invoice or certificate from one of them, giving those details, is the document an owner should keep with the work.
Hamburg, the Concorde Grid and Between Bridges
As a teenager Tillmans saw the photo-based work of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Rauschenberg and Warhol in Düsseldorf and at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and in 1983 he went to England as an exchange student. While living in Hamburg from 1987 to 1990 he had his first solo exhibitions, in 1988, made with a monochrome laser copier; he calls these Approach pictures his first work before he owned a camera. For more than twenty years he worked almost entirely with a 50mm Contax SLR, before turning to digital in 2009 and giving up film in 2012. In 1998 he spent a month at the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, and his Berlin studio is in an annex of a building of the early 1930s by Max Taut.
The Concorde Grid, 56 photographs of the aircraft taken from gardens, parks, railway lines and the perimeter fence at Heathrow, was made for his Chisenhale Gallery show in 1997, and the Total Solar Eclipse Grid of 1998 is in the Tate. The abstract and camera-less works run in series: the Silver works since 1998, Blushes, Freischwimmer, the paper drops of 2001 to 2008 and the folded Lighter works of 2005 to 2008. His first truth study center, photographs laid in vitrines among cuttings and found printed matter, was shown at Maureen Paley in 2005. In 2015 the British Museum acquired his portrait of its retiring director Neil MacGregor, the first photograph in its line of directors' portraits. He runs Between Bridges, a non-profit exhibition space, first in his Bethnal Green studio from 2006 to 2011 and since 2014 in Berlin.
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.
