Saturated Light: Silver Works
Saturated Light brings together, for the first time in one volume, almost thirty years of Wolfgang Tillmans's Silver works, abstract photographs built from marks that most photographic processes are designed to eliminate.
The 416-page hardcover documents the works themselves alongside their installation in institutions including Tate Britain (2003), the Venice Biennale (2009), K21 Dusseldorf (2013) and WIELS, Brussels (2020). An essay by art theorist Tom Holert examines the material and conceptual stakes of the series, while a conversation with photo engineer Klaus Pollmeier addresses the technical processes, intentional and accidental, behind the pictures. Tillmans describes the works on the cover itself as stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours.
The Silver works sit apart from the rest of Tillmans's photographic practice, which otherwise centers on the depicted subject; here the subject is the photographic material and chemical process itself, a line of work he has pursued continuously since the early 1990s alongside his portrait, still-life and abstract picture-based work.
