WOLFGANG TILLMANS | Greifbar 40

Regen Projects, Los Angeles Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The print is mounted to aluminium and framed in an artist's frame.
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“I’m always interested in the question of when something becomes something, or not, and how do we know?” Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation with Martin Herbert, ArtReview, April 2013, online.

 

At once fluid and nebulous, abstract and figurative, Greifbar 40 is an immersive hybrid of photography and painting by German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Part of the internationally acclaimed Freischwimmer series – the title of which stems from the German ‘swimming freely’ – Greifbar 40 envelops the viewer in a smouldering crimson haze. At first glance a grisly and bloody stain, this gestalt dissolves into soft, delicate clouds of indistinct forms that shimmer in and out of focus. Oscillation occurs between abstraction and figuration, with a multiplication of potential referents: smoke, cosmos, corpus and the Kantian supersensible emerge in the mind before collapsing. Through the brilliance of the medium, Tillmans engenders the impression of authorial absence. The result is an uncanny uniqueness: the piece is too painterly for photography, yet too mechanical for painting.

While the details of Tillmans’ process for his abstract photography are notoriously mysterious, certain stages are well-understood. Luminographs are scanned and enlarged, often to monumental scale, before being printed, mounted on aluminium, and framed – as with the present work – or printed by inkjet onto unframed paper. Indeterminacy (the metaphor of ‘chance’) plays an essential role in his method of exposing photographic paper to light and chemicals. Just as Tillmans is renowned for respecting the whitespace of the gallery, the resultant off-white space around the red cloud of Greifbar – a spectrum-inverted cosmos – is as much foreground as background, as much content as context. The techniques are reminiscent of the Colour Field and Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland. But it is to Gerhard Richter’s effervescent Abstrakte Bilder that the piece is perhaps most indebted.

The present work exemplifies a Richter-esque transcendence of aesthetic oppositions. The viewer’s eye is made to swim freely through a monochrome reality unstructured by prosaic categories. Although these abstract works are diametrically opposed to the documentary-styled verisimilitude of Tillmans’ early, representational works, they nonetheless successfully evoke a supersensible reality that, through interaction with our perceptual faculties, constructs the everyday world we inhabit. Tillmans’ process is to the present work as our brains are to the supersensible: his photographs “evoke all sorts of associations, like skin, or astronomy, or chemicals dissolving, and it’s all done by the brain. It’s what your ‘brain association tool’ creates” (Wolfgang Tillmans cited in: Dominic Eichler, ‘Thinking Pictures’ in: Wolfgang Tillmans and Karl Kolbitz, Eds., Wolfgang Tillmans Abstract Pictures, Ostfildern 2011, 2015 edition, pp. 9-10).

There is a musicality to Greifbar that is congruent with Tillmans’ earlier work. In his 2017 exhibition at Tate Modern, Tillmans experimented with a sonic installation that over four hours gradually developed from a single-track beat into a 48-track, complex whole. Indeed, his roots are entrenched in a halcyon era of what he has called “the pan-European language of techno” (Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation with Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian, February 2017, online). Through musicality and a hybridised medium, the pictorial criteria of space, time, colour, and line are abstracted in the indistinct yet instinctually knowable tones and forms that comprise Greifbar 40.