WOLFGANG TILLMANS (B. 1968), Small Mental Picture II, 2000

WOLFGANG TILLMANS (B. 1968)
Small Mental Picture II, 2000
C-print
signed, titled, dated and inscribed 'unique' in pencil (verso)
image/sheet: 16 x 11 ¾ in. (40.5 x 30 cm.)
This work is unique.

Pre-Lot Text
‘I’m always interested in the question of when something becomes something, or not, and how do we know?’ Wolfgang Tillmans
Executed in 2000 – the year that Wolfgang Tillmans became the first photographer to win the Turner Prize – Small Mental Picture II stands among his earliest abstract works. Colours and forms swim across the surface like ink, tinged with ethereal luminosity. The work belongs to the series of Mental Pictures that, along with the Blushes begun during the same year, paved the way for Tillmans’ iconic Freischwimmer series. Created in the darkroom without a camera or negatives, these works record the movement of light and chemicals over photosensitive paper. In doing so, they invite the viewer to contemplate the elusive point at which materials become images. ‘“Does this photo count as an image?” is the question that his pictures raise over and over again’, writes Jan Verwoert. ‘… This holds true both for his representational and his abstract works. The String Pieces (1999), Mental Pictures and Blushes (both series begun in 2000) are an investigation into the emergence of iconicity in an almost literal sense … The fascination of these pictures resides in a moment of indecision, or rather, undecidability. It cannot be definitively clarified whether they are merely the physical traces of a process of photo development or highly sensual, rich images’ (J. Verwoert, ‘Picture Possible Lives: The Work of Wolfgang Tillmans’, in J. Verwoert et al (eds.), Wolfgang Tillmans, London 2016, p. 40). Photographic in method, conceptual in spirit yet almost painterly in appearance, the present work captures the ineffable moment at which pictures come into being.
Recently the subject of major retrospectives at Tate, London and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Tillmans rose to prominence in the early 1990s as a photographer for the magazine i-D. As a teenager, he had been fascinated by the instability of printed images, and recalls experimenting with a photocopier that could enlarge greyscale photographs in increments up to 400 percent. His turn towards abstraction was ultimately rooted in these early investigations, the impetus of which was rekindled during a project for Parkett in 1998. For his contribution, Tillmans chose sixty photographic rejects from the previous six years of his practice, each uniquely characterised by printing mistakes and chemical slippages. At a time when many of his contemporaries were exploring digital manipulation techniques, Tillmans embraced analogue errors, delighting in the new visual possibilities they suggested. This stance would lead him to abandon the camera altogether for the Blushes and Mental Pictures, focusing instead on the elemental darkroom processes where such glitches occurred. ‘I’m always interested in the question of when something becomes something, or not, and how do we know?’, Tillmans explains (W. Tillmans, quoted at https://artreview.com/features/feature_wolfgang_ tillmans/ [accessed 7 December 2016]).