“I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment.” – Wolfgang Tillmans once said.

From 12 September 2022 to 1 January 2023, MoMA features a retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Presenting the full breadth and depth of the artist’s oeuvre and career to date, Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear invites viewers to experience a lively and vibrant exploration of the possibilities offered by the medium of photography.

This fantastic exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator, with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, and Phil Taylor, former Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography. Following MoMA, it will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Continually exploring social spaces and navigating between political causes and societal ideas, Tillmans’ approach is concerned with togetherness. The exhibition will feature the artist’s radiant images of nightlife across Europe, his sensual portraits of friends and strangers and culminate with architectural slide projections, documents of social movements to amazing windowsill still lifes and astronomical depictions.

Tillmans has rejected the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, continuously developing connections between his pictures and the social space of the exhibition. In his installations, unframed prints are taped to the walls or clipped and hung from pins, and framed photographs appear alongside magazine pages. Constellations of images are grouped on walls and tabletops as photocopies, colour or black-and-white photographs, and video projections, exemplifying the artist’s idea of visual democracy in action.

To look without fear will electrify the cultural agenda of the Autumn season for sure.