Tag: concrete column

In our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array of works ranging in genre from portraiture and landscape to architectural and abstract photography, and enunciates his longstanding commitment to capturing the truth of how it feels to be alive today.

Spanning nearly three decades, the photographs in the show are a natural evolution, decidedly not a revolution, of Tillmans’ famed practice as a zeitgeist documentarian. True to his roots, the show is punctuated with astrophotography and snapshots of underground counterculture that become poetic through Tillmans’ lens. In turn, these vignettes of his childhood passion and social life unwittingly transcend his personal history and become part of a shared cultural experience with the viewer.

Other works in the show of found objects and settings feel like they were captured offhand in the artist’s everyday adventures but remain deeply personal and honest. Tillmans sees life everywhere; in the industrial, the natural, the photomechanical. To Tillmans, every nook and cranny of the world is worthy of artistic investigation and every seemingly trite or random image has value in forming a holistic perspective.

With clear reverence for the aesthetic and conceptual capacities of the photographic medium, Tillmans is also interested in portraying transient moments of matter in motion. The exhibition’s titular work, Concrete Column, captures a pillar of wet concrete being poured, freezing the substance in its transitory state between liquid and solid and giving it eternal life in an otherwise ephemeral split-second. Through restless seascapes, shifting shadows, and celestial movements, Tillmans magnificently makes the impermanent permanent.

The exhibition is complemented by the soundtrack to Tillmans’ debut full-length album, Moon in Earthlight, which effectively heightens the imagination and senses by making the viewing experience more intimate and immersive. Accompanied by a film playing on loop in the gallery’s listening room, the 53-minute audio project fuses divergent production methods in the same vein as Tillmans’ photographic practice.

No one understands better than Tillmans that the truth is elusive because it is subjective. Recognizing the inconsistency of our lived experiences, he then seeks to depict common grounds and explore existential queries that plague us all: Who are we? Where did we come from? How are we all connected? Perhaps Tillmans’ greatest genius lies in his ability to imbue the ordinary and the familiar with a renewed sense of wonder and universality, a reminder we all need now more than ever.

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Thru Dec. 23rd, 2021