From 13 June to 22 September 2025, the Centre Pompidou is giving German artist Wolfgang Tillmans free rein to create a unique project to mark the end of the exhibition programme at the centre in Paris. He is taking over the 6,000 m2 of level 2 in the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (Bpi) and transforming the space by means of a curatorial experiment. This installation creates a dialogue between his work and the library space, questioning it both as an architectural structure and as a place for the dissemination 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 ver­ticality 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 of the building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers is an exceptional event.Throughout his artistic career, Tillmans (born in Remscheid, Ger­many in 1968) has pushed back the boundaries of the visible di­mension, immortalising and revealing the fragile beauty of the physical world. Proposing new ways of creating images, he ex­plores the profound transformation of the information media and channels of our time. In the process, he created a unique aesthe­tic 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 las­ting 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 ex­ploring 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 jeo­pardy, new ways of community building, and changes in the ex­pression 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 re­trospectives at leading institutions, including the Tate Modern in Lon­don in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He has also presented a major travelling exhibition on the African continent, entitled “Fragile” (2018 - 2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoun­dé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is the first institutional monograph in Paris since his ambitious instal­lation 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 inter­views with the artist.