Freedom From The Known

Freedom From The Known is the book of Wolfgang Tillmans’s 2006 exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, and it concentrates on his abstract photographs.

Steidl and P.S.1 published the 80-page hardcover with a text by Bob Nickas, who curated the show, which was Tillmans’s first major solo exhibition at an American museum. It reproduces 25 works, 24 of them made for the occasion. Most are cameraless pictures produced by manipulating light on photographic paper, and each was framed for the show, a departure for an artist who had made his name installing prints with tape and pins. Alongside them are figurative pictures from his 1990s Empire series, which he ran through a photocopier or fax machine before scanning and printing them large, and a selection of earlier work. Together they trace how his photographs moved between figure and abstraction.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid in 1968, won the Turner Prize in 2000 and lives and works in Berlin and London.