Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans snapped a Frank Ocean cover, but he's a rock star in his own right
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“Do you mind if I smoke?” asks German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans with a laugh during a recent video call from his home in Berlin.As he lights his cigarette, he looks every bit the renegade artist he is known for being.At 57, Tillmans is in the midst of staging his 10th exhibition in Los Angeles since the mid-1990s at Regen Projects.
He is one of the most celebrated photographers of his era, with a practice that collapses the distance between fine art and the pulse of street culture, spanning epic abstractions and the familiar textures of contemporary life.At the same time, Tillmans has another life as a serious electronic musician, recording a series of experimental albums, including his most recent, 2024’s “Build From Here.” He is deeply connected to the music world, and photographed the cover for Frank Ocean’s acclaimed “Blonde,” making him a rare artist to be in major museums while genuinely engaged with popular music and the club scene — a bit of a rock star in his own right.The official opening of his Regen show, “Keep Movin’,” attracted a line that wrapped around the building.Fans are drawn to his varied strands of work, which move instinctively between disparate approaches and subject matter, from famous faces to images sensitive to light and shape, in subjects as simple as the curve of paper folded softly over itself.During an early walk-through for a few dozen invited guests, Tillmans held forth on his personal cosmos, surveying pictures from the experimental to the deeply intimate.
Portraits, politically charged tabletop collages and quiet photographs that capture the simple vibrance of daily life are strewn across Regen’s 20,000 square feet of gallery space.“I see my work evolve more in evolutions, rather than in revolutions,” Tillmans said, gesturing to a conceptual wall-sized image created with a photocopier.His Regen show, through ...