Wolfgang Tillmans
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago)
220 East Chicago Avenue
May 20–August 13, 2006
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
September 17, 2006–January 7, 2007
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
February 15–May 13, 2007
Curated by Russell Ferguson and Dominic Molon
Wolfgang Tillmans resists a clear-cut chronology within his own practice by exhibiting earlier photographs alongside more recent work. Though a retrospective (the artist’s first in the US), this show promises the same salon-style installation: Tillmans will arrange some three hundred videos, installations, and photographs—from late-’80s and ’90s still lifes and portraits to recent light-effect abstractions—according to aesthetic groupings that will change at each institution to which the exhibition travels. In its rejection of both formal hierarchies and a linear approach, the show—co-organized by the MCA and the UCLA Hammer Museum—will doubtless demonstrate that Tillmans’s wide range of vision is, above all, democratic.Travels to the UCLA Hammer Museum, Sept. 17, 2006–Jan. 7, 2007; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Feb. 15–May 13, 2007.