On my mind - Extended

Wolfgang Tillmans has been a visiting professor at Beaux-Arts de Paris throughout the 2025–2026 academic year. In addition to around 150 individual one-hour tutorials, he conceived a seminar series for students entitled On My Mind. Each session centred on a specific enquiry, and Tillmans invited participants to explore a collection of images, usually distinct from his own work and conceived instead as a kind of visual notebook. Though arranged typologically (such as ‘How Things Age’ or ‘Corners’), these image groups offered insights into the artist’s thought process and way of seeing.

This final public session, On My Mind – Extended, concludes the series with extracts from previous talks in the series, including a focus on museum labels photographed by Tillmans over several decades, as well as subjects he has not yet had time to address, such as ‘Terreur de Luxe’ and ‘Folds’.

Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans is an artist working primarily in photography, whose practice encompasses three-dimensional installations, photographs generated with and without a camera, sound and video, bookmaking, journalism, and writing.
Since the early 1990s, Tillmans has challenged the possibilities of image-making. His work has epitomised a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and a persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional approaches to the medium. His practice continues to explore the fundamental question of what it means to create images in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Tillmans has exhibited widely in major international institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rien ne nous y préparait − Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2025); Ausstellung in Remscheid, Haus Cleff, Remscheid (2025-26); Weltraum, Albertinum, Dresden (2025); To look without fear, MoMA, New York (2022–23); Sound is Liquid, mumok, Vienna (2021–22); Today Is The First Day, WIELS, Brussels (2020); Wolfgang Tillmans, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2017); and 2017, Tate Modern, London (2017). Fragile, a traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, organized by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany, and traveled throughout Africa, with its last venue at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria in 2022.  Tillmans has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, opening in September 2026.
 

Image credit : Wolfgang Tillmans, Slide from 'How things age' 2025