Capturing the Discordant

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Among the first works one encounters in “Atair,” the new show at Andrea Rosen Gallery by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968), is a large C-print depicting a newspaper’s front page, below the fold. An article about the “dark side of gold” appears next to an ad for the jeweler Bulgari; beyond that pairing, it’s difficult to see what attracted him to the page. And yet, the page’s sheer size heightens the presence of the newspaper, the sense of it as an object — and it is strangely captivating to behold.

Discerning harmonious conjunctions in the trivial and meaning in the mundane are specialties of Mr. Tillmans. And just as his images often seem as casual as snapshots, his exhibitions tend to seem, at first, to group images as haphazardly as an office corkboard. Neither impression is correct. He elaborately stages and composes his pictures.

Indeed, Mr. Tillmans doesn’t show discrete images; he puts together complex installations comprising photographs of all sizes (and in this case some 3-D objects as well as a video), both unframed and framed, which are conceived and designed by him.

Thus part of the magnetism of “dark side of gold” (2006) derives from what hangs nearby — in other words, where and how the work is situated. A small, framed abstract photograph, “Lighter 32” (2007), with a light blue plane atop a white one, hangs on the left, echoing the horizontal blocking of the newsprint. Across the alcove, a gorgeous black-and-white picture of monkeys sitting on a tree-lined road is tacked, unframed, on a wall. Mr. Tillmans is a virtuoso of such minor contrasts — the banal newspaper blown up and framed, the delicate image left unadorned, almost forgotten.

Such imbalances and what he calls “transformations” of value occur throughout the show. For instance, the three largest works — “Venice” (2007), a view of boats on the water, “Garden” (2007), in which men on ladders string up lights, and two people sitting on the grass in “Victoria Park” (2007) — curiously anonymous, grainy black-and-white prints, hang in the main gallery. Mr. Tillmans explained his work in an interview: “They’re part of a series of pictures in which black-and-white photocopies were made into large-scale photographs. They represent an exact recording of what has to be the most ephemeral type of image that exists. A black-and-white copy with unleveled contrasts created by tiny dots of pigment … a total flattening of an image. What I’m interested in is the transformation of value that takes place when I take a tiny, worthless piece of paper, and give it a body, a weight by massively enlarging it and giving it physical substance by framing it.”

A number of works, including a small golden gong, vie for attention with the three slabs of framed ephemera. On one wall, for instance, a deceptively small, surreal black-and-white image of a man with tumor-like stones laid on his face, “Anders (Brighton, Arcimboldo)” (2006), as well as an offhand, color shot of a kickball team on the mall in Washington, D.C., flank an oversize, abstract-looking monochrome “flower” (2006).

Although the subtle interplay of works — especially between abstract and representational pictures — might suggest a sort of removed aestheticism, Mr. Tillman’s engagement with the world and with politics, announced at the outset in “dark side of gold,” is made explicit in a sculptural work, “Paradise, War, Religion, Work (TSC, New York)” (2007) that dominates the center of the gallery. Here four tables explore their respective themes with collage-like juxtapositions of C-prints, newspapers, offset prints, objects, and the like. The religion table contains newspaper photos of two Iranian teens noosed for engaging in homosexual acts, as well as snapshots of Mr. Tillmans’s exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, “Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religion.” The tables function in a manner parallel to the show as a whole, creating thought-lines with juxtaposed images.

Pictures tacked to the wall lead one down a corridor to a rear gallery. A crinkled sheet of mauve photo paper, “Lighter 31” (2007), rhymes with the creased seam of an archway in “Topkapi” (2006) across the hall. A group portrait of Hare Krishnas recalls the kickball team from the main gallery, while the tear shape in “paper drop (Krishnamurti) II” (2007) — part of a series in which the artist drops photo paper on the ground, allowing it bend and fold, and then photographs this found sculpture, thereby returning it to two dimensions — recalls a congruent shape in the less legible “paper drop (window)” (2006), also in the main gallery.

At the end of the trail, just beyond a grid of 15 pictures of shorthaired men in nightclubs, one finds a small room housing a video, “Farbwerk” (2006). Over the course of a minute, the camera slowly zooms in on red ink on the rollers of a printing press, bringing to mind the various abstract pictures in the show and, of course, the ink used to print them all — a fittingly diminuendo conclusion to a deceptively simply arrangement.

Much of the joy of this exhibition comes in attending to what Mr. Tillmans’s eye picks out of the world and in considering how he strings these elements together into tentative narratives and arguments. And because so much of his talent obviously lies in his ability to conceive pictures and make them relate to each other, one might say that Mr. Tillmans is merely an able photographer, but he’s an extraordinary artist.

Until November 24 (525 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-627-5450).


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use