The Centre Pompidou is giving free rein to Wolfgang Tillmans, who has come up with an original project to round off the programme at the Paris 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 fourty 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.

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.

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.

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