Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

Review
Whereas his early pictures invited the viewer into his personal world of sexual liberation, borderless travel and joyful togetherness, in more recent works, and in his increasing engagement as a political campaigner, he has argued that those freedoms are fragile, and based on wins that, if not safeguarded, can be lost. -- Matthew Anderson ― New York Times: Arts
Candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. -- Jason Farago ― New York Times: Arts
“To look without fear” perhaps means to look without worrying about what will be reflected back at you. It’s a form of viewership whose root desire is to engage. This democratic vision of photography can be seen equally in the ways Tillmans gathers text and images together and the ways that bodies commune within them. His work has room enough for us all. -- Evan Moffitt ― Aperture
Mr. Tillmans has expanded the possibilities of documentary photography with a flair, and without a big budget, in ways that others are already imitating. Anyone curious to see where he has led us needs to visit “To Look Without Fear,” and probably more than once. -- Richard B. Woodward ― Wall Street Journal
The result across the show is a kind of Tillmans–esque spiritualism; interconnectivity, bodies arm in arm, astrological images that might prompt us to question the verge of earthly visibility, how small we are in the face of it all. -- Amelia Abraham ― Guardian
These select moments tell stories beyond what we see, they are moments that touch the human spirit. In tender and vulnerable images, the artist speaks to beauty, awareness, and the collective human experience itself. -- Jennifer Sauer ― L'Officiel
What he is trying to communicate is the play of appearance in our lives: the bounty of visions that sustains us, yet also gets in the way. The whole field of visual media becomes, in this interpretation, a space for reconstruction and critical resistance. -- Nicholas Gamso ― i-D
His career is a lifelong inquiry into what gives an image meaning, including formalist experiments made without a camera. Amid a cultural outpouring of trolling, bad-faith posturing, disinformation, and edgelord provocation, Tillmans’s sincerity has not wavered. -- Emily Witt ― New Yorker
Full of humor, compassion and surprise...His sense of beauty, fragility and singularity remains intact. -- Sebastian Smee ― Washington Post
Over the course of his 36-year career, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has created what I think of as a new sublime. His work conveys that the bigness of it all is no longer in God, the ceilings of the Renaissance, the grandeur of nature, or the allover fields of the Abstract Expressionists. Tillmans intuited that the sublime had shifted, had alighted on us. -- Jerry Saltz ― New York Magazine: Vulture
Tillmans has been able to thread the needle through an increasingly vast network of image production, and its sites of display, in order to create a new kind of image―a moving image not simply in the affective sense, but in the circulatory one, too. His images get around, change shape. They are promiscuous. We can call them images in motion. -- Alex Kitnick ― Artforum
Encompassing photography, installation, print media, video and more, this publication is the most comprehensive account of Tillmans’ wide-ranging career to date
A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions,