Maureen Paley presents Build From Here, Wolfgang Tillmans’s eleventh exhibition with the gallery, inaugurating its new space at 4 Herald St, part of Tillmans’s former London studio, adding layers of personal and historical resonance.

The exhibition spans all three East London locations, 4 Herald St, 60 Three Colts Lane, and Studio M, featuring new photographic works with and without the camera, photocopy experiments, and two recent video pieces first shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in summer 2025.

Build From Here explores making and observation as acts of transformation. In works like Easter Passion (2007), Tillmans presents his former studio, with chromatic Silver works displayed alongside materials both used and surplus, inviting reflection on colour and form. Other pieces emerge from Remscheid, Germany, his hometown, where the city’s toolmaking heritage becomes the subject of photographs documenting people and machinery integral to production. Stunning!

Travelling Camera (2025), at 60 Three Colts Lane, moves across the reverse side of a 4K monitor, revealing circuit boards, inverters, and cables, overlaid with organic and cultural fragments, from sand dollars to postage stamps, linking industrial mechanisms with tactile objects. At Studio M, Wild Carrot (2025) turns a flower into poetry, accompanied by Tillmans’s kalimba, emphasizing video’s capacity to capture time, form, and presence.

The exhibition also celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Tillmans’s Truth Study Centre. Tables of photocopied media, texts, and photographs mingle with ephemera, reflecting studio processes and the interplay of making and display. Photocopy works remain central to Tillmans’s practice: garments and paper are transformed through the copier, producing abstracted, dynamic surfaces. Similarly, his Lighter and Paper Drop works explore the interaction of light, paper, and gravity, echoing the title of his most recent album, Build From Here (2024).

Tillmans’s practice spans continents and media. Recent shows include Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Ausstellung in Remscheid at Haus Cleff; and the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. His work has been exhibited globally, from To Look Without Fear at MoMA, SFMOMA, and AGO, to Fragile across Africa, to major surveys at Tate Modern, Albertinum Dresden, WIELS, and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Across photography, video, installation, and sculpture, Tillmans continues to examine the material world and its poetic potentials, how observation transforms, how surfaces conceal and reveal, and how art can make everyday processes profoundly alive.

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Image: August self portrait, c-type print, 61 × 50.8 cm – 24 × 20 in 2005, Wolfgang Tillmans