WOLFGANG TILLMANS — KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH

Photographer: Wolfgang Tillmans
Photographs and design: Wolfgang Tillmans
Editors: Bernhard Bürgi, Beatrix Ruf (Kunsthalle Zürich)
Publisher: JRP|Ringier, Zurich

Year: 2008. Reprint of the 1995 edition.
Format: Hardcover
Dimensions: 21.8 × 30.5 cm
Language: German / English
ISBN: 978-3-905829-36-5
Condition: Fine. No visible defects or damage to the interior or exterior; clean and exceptionally well-preserved copy.

A faithful reprint of the catalogue originally produced on the occasion of Wolfgang Tillmans' solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 1995, one of the earliest and most important institutional presentations of the artist's work.

The exhibition marked a significant moment in Tillmans' developing practice, which would go on to challenge established distinctions between photography, contemporary art, and everyday visual culture. In 2000, he became the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, further establishing the importance of his contribution to contemporary image-making.

Designed by Tillmans himself, the catalogue gathers the loose, intimate, and radically democratic image-world that defined his early work: portraits of friends and subcultural life, still lifes, landscapes, abstractions, and images drawn from magazines and everyday life. These works are reproduced through the casual precision and non-hierarchical sequencing that became central to Tillmans' visual language, allowing seemingly ordinary images to occupy the same space as more formally or conceptually charged photographs.

The catalogue draws on work made between the late 1980s and 1995, across Hamburg, London, New York, Los Angeles, Bournemouth, and beyond. Rather than presenting a conventional hierarchy of subjects, Tillmans' arrangement allows the photographs to establish relationships through proximity, rhythm, scale, and visual association. The result is a publication that functions not merely as a record of an exhibition, but as an extension of the artist's own approach to editing and display.

This 2008 reprint was produced as an initiative of Beatrix Ruf, then Director and Curator of the Kunsthalle Zürich, using Tillmans' original design and print material. Published by JRP|Ringier, Zurich, it preserves the structure and visual character of the original 1995 catalogue, making an important early institutional document of Tillmans' practice available in a later edition.

A significant publication for understanding the development of one of the most influential photographers of his generation, this volume remains an essential document of Tillmans' early image-world and of the exhibition that helped establish his institutional trajectory.