From 13 June to 22 September 2025, the Centre Pompidou in Paris is giving free rein to German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who has come
up with an original project to round off the programme at the Pa-
ris building. He has moved into Level 2 of the Public Information
Library (Bpi), transforming the 6,000 m2 of space in a curatorial
experiment that establishes a dialogue between his work and the
library space, questioning it both from an architectural
standpoint and as a place for the transmission of knowledge.

The exhibition explores almost 40 years of artistic practice
through a variety of photographic genres in a retrospective whose
order and logic are determined in response to the library space.
His work is displayed in a wide variety of forms, exploiting the ver-
ticality of the walls and the horizontality of the tables, defying all
attempts at categorisation. In addition to his photographic work,
Wolfgang Tillmans incorporates video, music, sound and text into
this vast installation, in a scenographic approach that utilises the
library’s characteristic features to reveal analogies between his
work as an artist and this place of knowledge. More than ever, the
artist will be demonstrating his gift for intervening in space – a
distinguishing quality of these exhibitions since 1993.

Hosting Wolfgang Tillmans prior to the metamorphosis ofthe building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers
is an exceptional event.

Throughout his artistic career, Tillmans (born in Remscheid, Ger-
many in 1968) has pushed back the boundaries of the visible di-
mension, immortalising and revealing the fragile beauty of the
physical world. Proposing new ways of creating images, he ex-
plores the profound transformation of the information media and
channels of our time. In the process, he created a unique aesthe-
tic universe, born of the countercultural spirit of the early 1990s.
Tillmans’ multifaceted work has led him on a quest to define a
new humanism and alternative ways of living together, with a las-
ting impact on contemporary creation. His work is deeply rooted
in the “Here and Now”: he provides a sweeping overview of forms
of knowledge and presents a free and sincere experience of the
world, examining the contemporary condition of Europe while ex-
ploring the techniques of mechanical reproduction.
By presenting the artist's archives alongside his most recent
works, the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou highlights dialectics
that have transformed the world since 1989: social advances and
freedoms that were once firmly established but are now in jeo-
pardy, new ways of community building, and changes in the ex-
pression of popular culture and dissemination of information.
Wolfgang Tillmans has designed this exhibition in its entirety,
creating works specifically for the venue.
In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been the subject of major re-
trospectives at leading institutions, including the Tate Modern in Lon-
don in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He has also presented a
2/2 major travelling exhibition on the African continent, entitled “Fragile”
(2018 - 2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoun-
dé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou
is the first institutional monograph in Paris since his ambitious instal-
lation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2002. It is accompanied by a catalogue
and the publication of an enlarged version of the Tillmans Reader,
translated into French and bringing together various texts and inter-
views with the artist.

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