Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)

Wolfgang Tillmans was born on August 16, 1968, in Remscheid, Germany. As a teenager, he kept a scrapbook of found photographs, but he did not begin taking his own photography seriously until a year before he finished high school, when he made Lacanau (1986), an image of his own leg as he walked on a beach. From 1987 to 1988, he worked as a switchboard operator at a community help organization in Hamburg, where he used the photocopier to enlarge found media photographs. In 1988, he became involved in the local rave scene and began documenting this emerging subculture. His snapshot-like photographs of young people were subsequently published in progressive magazines such as i-D and Prinz. From 1990 to 1992, he studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College in Bournemouth, England, where he was able to keep up with rave culture in a different setting. From 1992 to 1994, he lived and worked in London, relocating to New York from 1994 to 1995. During this time, he began to show more frequently, developing an exhibition style that consisted of nonhierarchical arrangements of unframed photographs tacked onto the gallery's walls. The personal, celebratory nature of his photography took a dark turn in 1997, when his partner Jochen Klein died of AIDS; an untitled series from this period documents simple details such as a last meal and a view from the hospital window. In 2001, he made the film Light (Body) and collaborated on a video for the pop music duo the Pet Shop Boys.

Tillmans has had solo shows at the Kunsthalle Zürich (1995), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Wolfsburg, Germany (1996), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1998), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli, Italy (2002), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002), and the Tate in London (2003), among other venues. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The Winter of Love at P.S. 1 in New York (1994), L'Hiver de l'amour at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), Human Nature at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1995), Berlin Biennale (1998), Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art in Kiel, Germany (1999), Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate in London (2001), Places in the Mind: Modern Photographs from the Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2001), and International Contemporary Art at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (2002). In 1995, he received the Ars Viva Prize from the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in Bremen, Germany, and in 2000 he won the Turner Prize from the Tate in London. From 1998 to 1999, Tillmans taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and in 2001 was made an honorary fellow at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. In 2003, he was made professor of fine art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He has been based in London since 1996.