To Look Without Fear
To Look Without Fear accompanies the largest survey of Wolfgang Tillmans's work ever mounted in North America. MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci organized the show, on view at the Museum of Modern Art from September 2022 through January 2023. It later traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario and SFMOMA.
The book covers four decades of work: early magazine photography and club pictures, abstract chemical experiments, portraiture, still life, video and sound installations. It follows Tillmans's practice past the single photograph. Magazines, posters, and the wall itself all become sites for pictures in his hands, not neutral supports. Yve-Alain Bois, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Clément Chéroux, Michelle Kuo, and eight other contributors each write on a different facet of the work. Phil Taylor and Andrew Vielkind compile a chronology spanning Tillmans's full career.
Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. In 2000 he became the first photographer, and the first non-British-born artist, to win the Turner Prize. To Look Without Fear sits alongside his other major survey catalogues from the same period, Sound Is Liquid at mumok Vienna and the Centre Pompidou installation Nothing Could Have Prepared Us. Of the three, it is the fullest career retrospective, spanning the entire arc of his work rather than a single body of it.
