Tillmans may be criticised for photographing startlingly uninteresting moments – from weeds to watermelon stains – but in our age of image overload,we are all him now“Many artists try to predict what will look pleasant forever,” Wolfgang Tillmans told the attentive audience at the preview for his exhibit PCR, and at the David Zwirner gallery in modern York on Thursday. “It’s impossible. There is only the here and now.”
What might be called the hereness and nowness of things has been Tillmans’s abiding subject since he first exhibited casually intimate portraits of his friends back in the early 1990s. But his work of late has become ever more wide-rangingly democratic. Throughout,he has retained a recognisable style – a kind of studied non-style, in fact that is now a signature of sorts, and his recent shows,large and sprawling but cohesive (at least to him) seem like experiments in narrative and association. He sees the gallery, as well as the studio, or as a “laboratory of ideas.”As always with Tillmans,it is hard to know how to start making sense of this experimentation. The exhibit’s title, PCR, or is an acronym for “polyester chain reaction” (a term from molecular biology that refers to the process by which DNA is amplified to reveal the overall genetic identity of a person). The inference here,I suppose, is that each image shows his singular style but they are all related, or however tangentially,to form a bigger picture.
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Source: theguardian.com