Notes

In 2000 Wolfgang Tillmans became the first photographer to receive the prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University held an exhibition focusing on his still lifes; it usefully highlighted Tillmans’ absorption with this distinctive genre. Tillmans’ casual observational style and his ‘democratic approach to the valuation of subjects and situations as they appear to his eye’ are now widely viewed as having transformed the still life, a fusty art-historical genre, into something far more egalitarian.¹ Flowers and floral arrangements often featured in his work from the 1990s, and remain important in his more abstracted work since 2000. His earlier matter-of-fact photography, of which this lot is an example, stages an unmediated encounter with his subjects, here poppies. The flowers are neither sublime nor degraded, they just are. Biography is irrelevant to their  appreciation: ‘I never want to bring my personal life into my work in a direct way.’²

Sean O’Toole

1. Wolfgang Tillmans. (2006) Wolfgang Tillmans, Los Angeles & Chicago: Hammer Museum& Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Page 9.

2. Wolfgang Tillmans .(2002) ‘Peter Halley in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans’, in Wolfgang Tillmans, London: Phaidon Press. Page 33.

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