October 25-February 23
At The Busch-Reisinger Museum (more about the Busch-Reisinger Museum)

Wolfgang Tillmans (1968 - ). still life, Tel Aviv, 1999. C-print, 20 x 24 in.; Edition of 3 and 1 artist proof. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. TL38404.3

The German-born, London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is among the most celebrated of contemporary photographers. Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize and highly influential among younger photographers, Tillmans has also been criticized by many in the world of photography for a body of work that often appears to erase the line between commercial and art photography, snapshot and "print." His interest in youth culture has been described as voyeuristic and exploitative, and yet he has also been widely credited for his ability to define a new aesthetic of intimacy and to celebrate the individuality of a generation that others are happy to write off as "X." Like the work of Nan Goldin, with whom he is often compared, Tillmans's early photography featured his friends and their parties in an effort to capture moments of intimacy within the constraint-free lifestyles of youth cultures. But Tillmans's interest in alternative concepts of beauty, sexuality, and politics is more sociological and distanced.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life will be the first museum exhibition of his photography in the United States. Featuring approximately 36 photographs and curated by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Benjamin Paul, the installation will depart from Tillmans's practice of installing his own work-clustering groups of varied size prints together and pinning these directly to the wall. Paul has instead chosen to emphasize Tillmans's interest in reconsidering such traditional genres as landscape, portrait, and still life within the context of contemporary visual culture. By focusing on the still-life photographs, Paul emphasizes a subset of the artist's work that is at once lushly beautiful, surprisingly humanistic in its attention to the trappings of lived lives, and particularly well suited to his exploration and exploitation of the aestheticizing so central to both traditional still life and commercial advertising.

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