DRESDEN.- Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid) is one of today’s most influential living artists. He creates works that enable the viewer to see the world and human coexistence in a unique way. Following retrospectives in the USA and Canada, the Albertinum is now presenting a cross-section of the artist’s multifaceted oeuvre. The exhibition “Wolfgang Tillmans. Weltraum” also includes works which have been created since 2022 and are now being shown for the first time in an institutional setting. “Weltraum” is Tillmans’ first major exhibition in a German museum in more than half a decade. Around 150 works photographic and video works are on display.

For almost forty years, Tillmans has steadily expanded his visual cosmos: abstract photography born from physical experiments with light, paper, and chemicals; portraits of contemporaries, friends, and chance encounters; serially developed landscape images, and temporary sculptures made from everyday objects transformed into tactile still lifes. All these elements come together in Tillmans' overarching artistic endeavour to passionately explore story telling through images. His creative drive is fuelled by his willingness to rigorously question the possibilities of visual perception, to look at the interplay between human cognition and photographic representation by asking: "What do I see and what do I want to see? What is in the picture?” It is a reflection of his enduring delight in embracing doubt, a defining moment of his compassionate view of the world.

The exhibition offers an exciting, wide-ranging insight into the artist’s themes and shows the interaction between Tillmans’ various groups of works and working methods. His characteristic style of hanging his works, in which he brings different moments in time and different geographies together in different formats, enables his visual narratives to develop in a unique way. The diversity of his topics, be it astronomy, social change or human solidarity, forms a network of the large and the small that metaphorically turns the exhibition into the “Weltraum”, the “space of the world” and the “outer space” suggested in the title of the exhibition.

Wolfgang Tillmans is constantly on the move, driven by his curiosity about current debates: most recently, he followed the intangible traces of new technologies from San Francisco, a hotspot for artificial intelligence, via Guam to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia. In the exhibition, the resulting works are interwoven with older pieces, creating completely new perspectives – for example, between the utopias of electronic music of the 1990s, for which Tillmans became known, and the now bewildering tangle of electronic developments or the debates in the last ten years about freedom of travel and drawing borders.

For several years now, music has played a central role in Tillmans’ work: alongside photographic works, the exhibition also presents Tillmans’ latest sound-video work, “Build From Here” (2024), which brings together the songs from his current album. The music videos combine the central elements of his work: creating images, writing, exploring electronic music and reflecting on his own presence. Tillmans uses the fragility and weightlessness of his music as a medium to convey messages of humanity and openness.

As a special added dimension of his exhibition at the Albertinum, Wolfgang Tillmans has created an extensive artist’s book that brings his work into a dialogue full of associations with the history of the Dresden collections. “Wolfgang Tillmans. Things matter, Dinge zählen” is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König and includes a conversation with the artist conducted by curators Hilke Wagner and Dennis Brzek. The artist’s book will be presented in the exhibition together with its two references – Tillmans’ exhibition catalogue for Tate Britain from 2003 and the inventory catalogue of the Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister in Dresden from 1987.