Wolfgang Tillmans

Sitter in 2 portraits
Artist of 3 portraits
Born in Remscheid, Germany, Tillmans attended Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design (1990-92) before moving to London, where he developed a new kind of subjectivity in photography, questioning existing values while asking what it means to create a picture in an image-saturated world. From the start he expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium while working across multiple platforms from galleries and museums to magazines such as i-D, The Face, and The Big Issue, where he was guest editor, to his own books such as Concorde (1997), Soldiers: The Nineties (1999), and truth study center (2005). In 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the Turner Prize. His many exhibitions include those at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY (2006), Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2008), and Tate Modern (2017). A monograph was published by Phaidon in 2002 and revised and expanded in 2014. In 2018, Tillmans debuted at the English National Opera as set designer for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.