Centre Pompidou’s final exhibition before closing for renovations is Wolfgang Tillmans’ gargantuan effort Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. It takes up the entire second floor of a museum that is now otherwise empty. The stained carpet tiles, but also the computer station and an occasional bookshelf, point to the former use of this vast open space: it used to be the Bpi, a public library freely accessible to all.
Pontus Hultén, Pompidou’s first director, aimed to make the museum “popular yet scholarly”–squarely civic. In the end, perhaps only its public library delivered on its 1970’s promise. That library was a place to study, get on the internet, skim through public TV channels, or just to get warm and sleep a bit. The setting of an emptied library eerily resonates with the full portée of Tillmans’ work; it’s a site to mourn a lost utopia. Such emptied former public space equally crosses the spectrum from hope and promise to loss and melancholia (with a fair chunk of everyday banality as well). As always, the pictures are fluidly hung in a non-chronological, loosely thematic way that freely mixes various media. It’s hard to appear so effortless, to be playful yet precise.
The thousands of pictures represent 40 years of work in a 6,000m² space. It begs the question: what is Wolfgang Tillmans doing? Upon entering the exhibition I asked this to a dear photographer friend. His dry, meditative answer was: “Il fait de la photo” (He’s doing photography). However broad, the answer doesn’t fully cover his practice. The exhibition also comprises his videos, his publications, his political campaigns, archival tables (Decades Tables, 2025) and the complete chronology of his Between Bridges exhibition space. Some works also spill over to the metro system; photography exhibitions are often prominently featured in the Parisian metro, and for this occasion, Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is presented in dozen stations across the city.
It has taken me a while to figure out Tillmans’ aims. Why the cosmopolitan still-lives, the erotic bodies, and an infatuation for club culture? How are they connected? How is it possible that pictures with so little “signature” are so distinctly recognisable as his work? Tillmans himself linked his work (and the impetus of mapping the world) to German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s book Die Welt ist schön (The World is beautiful), prime Neue Sachlichkeit detailing the wonders of nature and technology from a century ago. Indeed, there’s an almost encyclopedic ambition, a distance to things, a productive refraining from moralising verdicts. Yet, there’s also a staunch belief that the world is animated, a certain humanism?
These apparent contradictions only started to make sense once I saw one of his photographs (casual as ever) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, hung next to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ light bulb assemblage Untitled (A Love Meal) from 1992. Suddenly, the lightness of his work became laden with the experience of losing one’s partner to a terrible disease, as both Gonzalez-Torres and Tillmans lost their lovers to AIDS. The everyday then becomes heavily drenched in a sense of loss, a memento mori, but also an invitation to find joy in whatever is left. The everyday is, then, no longer banal, but enchanted. It is hard-won.
This sense of loss opens an avenue to a conditional, present-perfect conception of time: it could have been… It’s the realisation that the past held a certain promise that remained unfulfilled. In 1997, when Tillmans took his many unassuming pictures of Concorde flying through the sky, he aimed to capture his sentimentality for a fraught utopian symbol. However flawed–antisocial, environmentally destructive, and literally ending in a crash–it brings us back to a time that ardently believed in a better future.
The awareness that a future-oriented past is bygone manifests as an acute sense of the now–or rather, of what is new. This penchant for newness fosters a predilection to picture youth and fashion, but it also explains his snapshot style of working. The photographs themselves, therefore, need to be pristinely new and free of any wear. All of the exhibited photographs were freshly printed, coming directly from his studio.
The magnitude of this endeavour–the 1:10 maquette used to prepare the exhibition was 13 metres long–and the effort to bring together almost every photographic series Tillmans has ever produced is best demonstrated in how the Concorde project is presented. Instead of showing a single photograph, a selection from the series, or its dedicated publication, a meticulous vitrine contains 64 distinct copies, allowing each and every page to be individually displayed.
What I once misread as nihilism–a succession of slightly banal pictures–turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a a melancholic position that is deeply humanist. Tillmans believes in people, in society, in photography, in truth, and perhaps even in the future, but always against the backdrop of loss–of death, of the rise of the extreme right, of disinformation, of the fragmentation of subcultures, and more. That’s true generosity.
The question then is how such a deeply personal and incredibly productive way of working translates into his politics. If the art world often favors ideas as radical as they are impractical (let’s say, wanting to abolish the nation-state), Tillmans is committed to a plainly liberal position, most notably in his active campaigns for voter turnout and the European Union in general.
Once again, what could be seen as a bland position (what could be more generic than forwarding basic democratic principles?) is, in fact, an arduously practiced civic engagement, aiming to fight hate and promote love. Tillmans truly believes in humankind. That’s why his humanist-encyclopaedic project resonates so strongly at the Centre Pompidou. Once a bastion of liberté and égalité, the museum now sits in ruins, a testament to what could have been.
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Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and London.
Laurens Otto is a curator and writer.
