Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is effortlessly cool. He came to prominence capturing the clubbing scene of the 90s and in 2000 went on to become – with critics voicing just the right amount of indignation – one of the youngest artists to win the Turner prize, and the first to do so with photographic stills. But to describe something as fashionable is to duck one question and to raise many more. Fortunately Tillmans’ new retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is proof of substance to match the style.
Tillmans’ casual approach (no doubt an agonised affectation) is almost his undoing. Some pictures are taped to the walls, others held up by big bullfrog clips. Tillmans is testing the boundaries of gallery art, challenging our expectations of photography and installations; but what was revolutionary for his Turner show is now in danger of becoming lazy and predictable. While the presentation brings an important sense of intimacy, tangibility and spontaneity to the exhibition, it also highlights a certain incoherence at its heart. The Serpentine Gallery is a beautiful space, but it is also a slight one. Its four rooms, gloriously lit by the sun streaming in from Kensington Gardens, demand tight editing. Tillmans instead adopts a kitchen-sink approach to his retrospective. A clear structure is hard to pick out.
It seems, however, that this is precisely the point. The artist is not presenting a particular theme or interpretation, because that is not how life works. Tillmans is at his most dull when he is at his most obvious, as three mixed-media collages in the central room make plain. On flimsy plywood tables, recalling half-hearted museum vitrines, Tillmans illustrates issues such as the persecution of homosexuals, but the stories told give too much away. Far better are photojournalistic works such as Heptathlon. Here a superficial blandness becomes an insistent and compelling call to probe further. Is the athlete’s distant gaze one of intensity or apathy, focus or detachment?
Tillmans photography has an egalitarian medium, which is to say that anyone can take a picture of anything. Such is the quality of his eye, however, that this never becomes a boring or indiscriminate principle. Eierstapel shows a precarious tower of battery eggs in crates. Hardly promising, but the play of light off the eggshells gives the photograph a pristine, pixellated luminosity. For an artist who made his name with shoots for fashion magazines like the Face and i-D, the power of Tillmans’ nature photography is striking. Though he retains a keen commercial eye (as a night-time picture of Times Square illuminated by Nike signs shows) these shots are merely insipid advertising in comparison to compositions such as Nanbei or the Wald series. The latter, a collection of blurred sepia C-prints, gradually reveals the outlines of a dense forest. It is impenetrable, majestic, and somehow threatening.
The range of subjects covered across Tillmans’ career has led the artist to focus increasingly on the act of observation itself. His more recent work, centring on the chemical processes of photography, is a real success. Constellations of colour-saturated abstractions dot the walls. Huge prints show the creation of colour in Tillmans’ darkroom, as chemicals spread across canvas like blood through water. Here are the beauty and magic of photography’s basic materials.
The strongest piece, Dan, unites the figurative and the abstract elements of Tillmans’ work. A man reaches to the ground, caught in an oblique, balletic pose. The photo seems off-angle; it has a strange momentum of its own as limbs and a background of crawling ivy orbit a shock of orange hair. Not all the exhibition works as well, but on form Tillmans has a singular ability to reconcile culture and nature, the fashionable and the fundamental.
Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2. Until 10th September. Admission free.
