WOLFGANG TILLMANS. PASSAGES SILENCIEUX.

In the organizer's words:

SELECTED WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION

The Espace Louis Vuitton Munich is pleased to present Passages Silencieux, a new exhibition dedicated to the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. This exhibition is a new chapter in the Hors-les-murs program of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. This program presents selected works from the collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, fulfilling the Fondation Louis Vuitton's mission to reach a wider audience through international projects. As a central position in the collection, Tillmans' photographic work was already shown in 2014 in the inaugural exhibition of the Fondation Louis Vuitton
in 2014. His exhibition Passages Silencieux ("Silent Passages") thus underscores the Fondation's commitment to Tillmans' work and builds on the success of the major retrospective dedicated to him at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was on display until the closure of that very institution for renovation work in the fall of 2025. The works presented here were compiled from the collection.

The installation that the artist has created across both floors of the Espaces Louis Vuitton Munich eschews chronology. The works span almost 35 years of his career. They interweave connections between various temporal and geographical moments and different atmospheres. Tillmans' multifaceted portraits - works from various points in time - enter into a dialog with more recent photographs of plants, still lifes and abstract works from the turn of the millennium. These photographs correspond to each other without any hierarchy
of scale or genre - some are framed, others are not. Tillmans makes silent connections between different images to redefine the relevance of each image for the contemporary viewer. These are as intimate as they are collective. They demonstrate the transformation of a world in motion, made up of interconnected elements within almost infinite constellations. According to Tillmans, the picture is "a good starting point for thinking about the world".

While drawing our attention to the characteristics of his environment, Tillmans simultaneously reveals the material nature of his chosen medium. In the 1990s, he began to create his own photographic prints. Passages Silencieux emphasizes this experimentation. In some works, such as Berlin (2006), he emphasizes the materiality of his images by re-photocopying and re-photographing existing prints. In addition, he sometimes enlarges them to emphasize the texture of the paper used and the peculiarities of its colouring. His abstractions created without a camera reveal a special pictorial process, an impressive example of which is the series Einzelgänger (2003). Produced without negatives, these three works represent the quintessence
of photography. They exist solely through photosensitive paper and the interplay of chemistry and light. For Tillmans, these abstract creations, which he has exhibited alongside his figurative works since 1998, represent a pause rather than a break.

About the artist
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in Remscheid (Germany) in 1968. An important figure in contemporary art, he works between Berlin (Germany) and London (United Kingdom).

In the late 1980s, he began experimenting with a Canon black and white copier, which he often describes as
an initiatory milestone in his practice. From 1990 to 1992, the artist studied at the College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, before settling in London. He met the London gallery owner Maureen Paley in Hamburg in 1992 and the gallery owner Daniel Buchholz in Cologne in 1993. Both organized his first solo exhibitions, in London and Cologne respectively. In the late 2000s, Tillmans began the transition from analog to digital photography. However, he still works with analog processes for his works without a camera.

His first institutional exhibition took place in 1995 at the Kunsthalle Zürich (Switzerland). In 2000, he was the first photographer - and the first non-British artist - to be awarded the Turner Prize.

Since then, his work has been shown regularly around the world, notably in retrospectives at the Tate
Britain, London (2003); the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006; traveled on to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and the Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, until 2007), USA; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2008); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2010; traveled on to exhibition spaces in South America including the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo,
Brazil; the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru;
and the Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, Chile, until 2012); the Kunsthalle Zürich (2012; traveled to Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, until 2013); the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012; traveled to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 2013); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2015); the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2016); the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2017); the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2018); at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, the exhibition Rebuilding the Future (2020); at the Wiels Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brussels, Belgium, the exhibition Today Is The First Day (2021); at the mumok - Das Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria, Sounds is Liquid (2022). The exhibition To look without fear at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, showed works by the artist, which were later also presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2023) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2023) in addition to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2022). In 2009 he took part in the 53rd Venice Biennale (Italy) and in 2014 in Manifesta10 in Russia. In 2012 he was elected a full member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and the following year was appointed a member of the Royal Academy, London.

Fragile, a touring exhibition of the artist's work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d'Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo - organized by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany - and toured Africa. The exhibition was last shown in 2022 at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria.

In 2025, the Centre Pompidou in Paris presented Rien ne nous y préparait - Tout nous y préparait / Nothing could have prepared us - Everything could have prepared us as the last exhibition before its closure for several years due to renovation work. The site-specific solo exhibition conceived by Tillmans was shown in the vacant Public Information Library (BPI). Also on view in 2025 were the major solo exhibitions Weltraum at the Albertinum in Dresden, Germany, and Ausstellung in Remscheid, Haus Cleff in the artist's hometown of Remscheid, Germany. The Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, France) has been honoring his work since the Fondation's inaugural exhibition in 2014 and continues to do so. In 2023, the Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo presented the monographic exhibition Moments of Life with a selection of works by Wolfgang Tillmans from the collection.

About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
As an institution dedicated to the public interest, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is devoted exclusively to contemporary art and contemporary artists.
contemporary art and contemporary artists, as well as the trends of the 20th century that have significantly influenced them. The collection and the exhibitions it organizes pursue the objective of making art accessible to a broad public. The impressive museum building, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, embodies the Fondation's forward-looking artistic statement and is already considered an emblematic example of 21st century architecture. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has already welcomed more than eleven million visitors from France and around the world.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton's mission statement includes the realization of international projects both in Paris itself and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums, such as with the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modernism - The Shchukin Collection, 2016, and The Morozov Collection, 2021), the MoMA, New York (Being Modern: The MoMA in Paris) or the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (The Courtauld Collection - A Vision for Impressionism). The Artistic Director has also developed the "Hors-les-murs" program, specially designed for the art spaces associated with the Fondation - the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Venice, Munich, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka - which are dedicated exclusively to the collection. Their exhibitions are open to the public with Free admission and their programming is part of the cultural commitment of the House.