Fold Me
Fold Me was Wolfgang Tillmans’s fourth solo exhibition at David Zwirner, in the gallery’s rooms on West 19th Street. It came soon after his major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, and it was made entirely of new work, ranging as widely as he always has.
The fold is the thread. It is there literally, in cloth and paper, and as an idea: what is turned inward and what is shown. Tillmans has photographed folds since his early Faltenwurf (Drapery) pictures, and here they become a study of material and space.
Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘Provo, Utah and the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains’, 2023
Landscape is given room, notably in Provo, Utah and the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains and in Lunar Landscape. Hung near one another, the worn ground of the earth and the surface of the moon make an odd, affecting pair: the world seen as a gathering of moments too large to hold in one frame.
Water returns in several forms. Watering, a (2022), made in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, is a still life about the ordinary sources of drinking water in West Africa, with bottle caps that seem to hover and a plastic water sachet, plain and quietly beautiful.
Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘Lunar Landscape’, 2022
The still lifes move from the everyday to the deliberately botanical. In Lagos still life II, bruised mangoes and plantains sit close and domestic; Rain Splashed Painted Life plays with the eye, its muddy surface turning, at a step back, into something like a horizon at dusk.
The portraits bring in the social. Their sitters come from many backgrounds and lines of work, some photographed by arrangement and some by chance, and each picture holds its own moment in time.
The Lighter works take the fold most literally. They are photographs of folded photographic paper, their colour and shape made in the darkroom without a camera. Referring to nothing outside themselves, they push the question of what a photograph is.
Taken together, Fold Me read as a portrait of the present, assembled from many small, exact observations.
The exhibition ran at David Zwirner until October 14, 2023.
Please note the colors in the photos may not accurately represent the true colors of the artworks. The photos have been processed for this publication.
