Wolfgang Tillmans : rien ne nous y préparait - Tout nous y préparait

Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 13 June - 22 September 2025

For more than 30 years, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968-) has been pushing the boundaries of the visible world by capturing and revealing the fragile beauty of the physical world. Through photography, video, music, sound and print, he is committed to the search for a new humanism and alternative ways of living together. Proposing new ways of making images, he examines the profound transformation of the media of our time, focusing on the exploration of physical pleasure, the natural and urban environment, and the very materiality of photography. He has thus shaped a unique aesthetic and social universe, born of the spirit of the counterculture of the early 1990s.

This catalogue of the retrospective dedicated to the German artist traces his entire artistic practice through various photographic genres, such as portraiture, still life, architecture, documentary and abstraction. His work takes many different forms and plays on the verticality of walls and the horizontality of tables, defying any attempt at categorisation.