Transforming Spaces
CELINE supports the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us.
By Art+ Magazine Team
Photos courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York
August 2, 2025
From 13 June to 22 September 2025, the Centre Pompidou is giving free rein to German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who has come up with an original project to round off the program at the Paris building. He is taking over the 6,000 m² of level 2 of the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) and transforming the space that brings his work into dialogue with the library, seen both as architecture and as a place for the transmission of knowledge.
Flowerhead, 2001
The exhibition spans nearly 40 years of artistic creation and covers the entire spectrum ofTillmans’ practice. It presents a cross-section of his photographic oeuvre, whose order and display emerge in response to the architecture rather than from a sense of chronology. In parallel, Tillmans integrates videos, music and sound as well as his extensive collection of printed matter and personal objects. He also plays with the infrastructure of a library to highlight the analogies between his artistic work and this particular place of knowledge and social diversity. More than ever, the artist intervenes in the space—a hallmark of his exhibitions since the mid-1990s—and with it transforms existing structures and invents new forms of display. By that, he has developed an all-encompassing installation and reinvented the way photography is exhibited.
Hosting Wolfgang Tillmans prior to the metamorphosis of the building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers is an exceptional event.
Strauchen eines Blockes auf einer Freiformschmiedepresse, Dirostahl, Remscheild,b, 2024
Throughout his artistic career, Tillmans (born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968) has consistently shifted the boundaries of the visible—capturing the sometimes beautiful, sometimes unsettling fragility of the physical world while also creating pictures without a camera, celebrating the purity (and impurity) of photosensitive material on the verge of obsolescence. In this way, he hasshaped his own unmistakable aesthetic universe, which emerged from his early astronomical observations and the spirit of the subcultures of the early 1990s. This exploration, deeply rooted in his time, has fueled his search for timely forms of humanism and coexistence, a quest that has had a lasting influence beyond contemporary art.
Empire (US / Mexico border), 2005
By bringing together early works from his archive with most recent works for this exhibition, he echoes the dialectic that has characterized the world since 1989: social progress and freedoms that were hard-won and that seemed secure are once again put into question. One might read the exhibition title, which the artist has held close over the years, as a reflection of the complexity at play in our perception of time, but also of reality and how we shape it.
The Glove That Fits, 2024
In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been the subject of major retrospectives at leading institutions, including the Tate Modern in London in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He has also presented a major travelling exhibition on the African continent, entitled Fragile (2018 -2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoundé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is the first institutional monograph in Paris since his ambitious installation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2002. It is accompanied by a catalogue and the publication of an extended version of the Tillmans Reade translated into French and bringing together various texts and interviews with the artist.
Junger Hausrotschwanz, 2022
As a main partner of the exhibition, the house of CELINE, is collaborating for the first time ever with the Centre Pompidou on the “ACCÈS LIBRE par CELINE” initiative: offering select days of free admission to the public. This unique initiative was imagined as an open invitation to all, an opportunity to discover the world of Wolfgang Tillmans and the Centre Pompidou ahead of its imminent closure.
Four days of free access, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.: June 13, July 3, August 28, and September 22, 2025.
