拍品 123
  • 123

WOLFGANG TILLMANS | Abney Park

估價
50,000 - 70,000 GBP
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招標截止

描述

  • Wolfgang Tillmans
  • Abney Park
  • signed on a label affixed to the reverse
  • c-print in artist's frame
  • 199 by 260.4 cm. 71 3/8 by 102 1/2 in.
  • Executed in 2008, this work is the artist's proof, aside from an edition of 1.

來源

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Acquired from the above by David Teiger in 2009

展覽

Los Angeles, Regen Projects, Wolfgang Tillmans at Regen Projects, October - December 2008

Condition

Colour: Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few tiny nicks and media accretions to the extreme outter edges of the artist's frame.
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拍品資料及來源

Executed in 2008, Abney Park is a powerful example of Wolfang Tillman’s engaging and thought-provoking body of work. A couple of young men in punk attire are photographed together, seemingly unaware that they are being shot by Tillmans. Captured in London’s Abney Park, the present work perfectly encapsulates the artist’s singular vision, where quotidianity is captured effortlessly and poetically transferred into the realm of art. The artist has always expressed an interest in documenting those who disregard bourgeois norms and has explained how “I was always interested in the free, or at least non-branded, activities that functioned outside control and marketing. The pockets of self-organization – free partying, free sex, free leisure time – are on the retreat. A less commercial spirit of togetherness is worth defending against the market realities, which are the result of the implementation of an atomized, privatized model of society” (Wolfgang Tillmans cited in: Exh. Cat, London, Tate Modern, Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, p. 24). Distinctly figurative, it is upon closer study that the viewer realises that Abney Park has certain abstract qualities to it. Based on a photograph taken previously, the source image was then photocopied by the artist and enlarged, creating a visible granulated pattern on the surface of the image that confers the work with a newspaper quality. The artist’s idiosyncratic manipulation of his own images can be traced back to his very first show in Hamburg in 1988, where he used a laser photocopier to enlarge and distort images of builders, beaches and waterfalls. Mark Godfrey explains how “by using the photocopier, Tillmans relinquished some of his authorship to the machine, later recognising that this was an analogy of his own life at the time, feeling in and out of control of his own fate” (Mark Godfrey cited in: Ibid, p. 40). The artist has continued to push the boundaries of what photography can be and mean, exploring the beauty in photographic development errors to create ethereal compositions such as his Blushes and Freischwimmer, capturing the harmonious compositions discarded items of clothing are able to create in his Faltenwurf series, and documenting his own life and that of his family and friends through a series of poignant portraits that have captured and continue to capture the spirit of a generation.

In Abney Park, Tillmans elevates the supposedly impoverished visual quality of the black-and-white photograph, thereby questioning the importance of photography, shunning refinement and precision in favour of a distorted medium – one that astutely challenges the collective and contributes to Tillmans’ dynamic and revolutionary repertoire.