Wolfgang Tillmans - Nothing could have Prepared us, everything could have prepared us

Exhibition catalogue Wolfgang Tillmans. Nothing could have Prepared us, everything could have prepared us, presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (13 June to 22 September 2025).

The retrospective dedicated to Wolfgang Tillmans explores more than thirty-five years of artistic practice across various photographic genres, such as portraiture, still life, architecture, documentary and abstraction.

His work takes on a wide variety of forms, playing on the verticality of the walls and the horizontality of the tables, thus defying any attempt at categorisation. In addition to his photographic work, Tillmans incorporates moving images, music, sound and texts into this vast installation, with contributions from performance artists.

He has thus forged a distinctive aesthetic universe, born of the counter-cultural spirit of the early 1990s. Through his multifaceted body of work, he has embarked on a quest for a new humanism and alternative ways of living together, exerting a lasting influence on contemporary art. His work is deeply rooted in the ‘Here and Now’: it offers a panorama of forms of knowledge and proposes a sincere and free experience of the world, scrutinising the contemporary condition of Europe whilst exploring techniques of mechanical reproduction.

By bringing the artist’s archives together with his most recent works, the Centre Pompidou exhibition highlights the dialectics that have shaped the world since 1989: social advances and freedoms once established but now under threat, new ways of forming communities, and the evolving expressions of popular culture and modes of information dissemination. Wolfgang Tillmans conceives this exhibition as a whole and creates works specifically for the venue.