Wolfgang Tillmans2001

Since winning the Turner Prize in 2000 for his 1990s oeuvre of portraits and snapshots, German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has increasingly gravitated towards the abstract and material-specific properties of his medium. Following Blushes, the Freischwimmer series and the monochromatic Silver series, his most recent abstract works--of which the creased and folded Lighter series is perhaps the most significant--treat the photograph, and especially photographic paper itself, no longer as a reproductive medium, but as a material object. In Tillmans' "paper drop" photographs, the paper's physical folds and curves are photographed to produce geometric, tactile compositions. Other works oscillate more elusively between photograph and object, always thriving in the interplay. "For me, the...