Wolfgang Tillmans

“I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.”

“I see my practice as picture making. Whatever is available, I use.”

“There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.”

“A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.”

“When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.”

“In order to engage in an 'experiencing of the world,' one has to physically move oneself to the most diverse places on earth.”

“Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.”

“It's very real, the narrow line between a night danced away and the potential of death around the corner.”

“On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don't see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus.”

“Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure.”

“Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up.”