Wolfgang Tillmans: Portikus Frankfurt

A catalogue published for Wolfgang Tillmans' 1995 exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, one of the early institutional shows that established the loose, wall-spanning installation approach central to his work.

Published to accompany the exhibition running September 2 to October 15, 1995, the catalogue reproduces Tillmans' photographs from the show alongside a conversation between the artist and curator Neville Wakefield, with text in German and English. Rather than presenting a single body of work in sequence, Tillmans' Portikus installation mixed subjects and scales in the manner that came to define his exhibition-making: club culture, still life, portraiture and abstraction shown together as a single field rather than a linear narrative.

Tillmans (born 1968) rose to prominence in the early 1990s with photographs of youth culture and club life for magazines including i-D, before moving into an installation practice that treats the exhibition wall itself as a compositional unit. He won the Turner Prize in 2000, the first photographer and the first non-British artist to do so, and this Portikus catalogue documents his work at an early stage of that trajectory.