Winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2026: Wolfgang Tillmans

Laudation: Bernhart Schwenk, September 17, 2026

Dear Wolfgang Tillmans,
dear Ann Demeester,
dear colleagues from the Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation,
dear audience members,

may I ask you something? «How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?» Wolfgang Tillmans asked that question himself; it crops up in a number of his works, and I think it is a useful and appropriate introduction to the artistic oeuvre that we are honouring today - one that extends beyond the unmistakeable photographic works, the photocopies, films, installations, music projects, books, poster campaigns and more that he has created over the last four decades.

«How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?» That question encapsulates the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, not least because it is bound up with reflection on everything including the self - and with an exceptionally open-minded attitude to art, society, our past and our future. That interest in the world and immense capacity for empathy come across in every single work by Wolfgang Tillmans. His creations never formulate knowing answers: they always ask inspiring questions - of the artist himself, but also of us all.
The question I have just quoted is one that Wolfgang Tillmans has posed in a variety of images - as here, in German, on a sheet roughly A4 in size in which we look down from above on two books with their pages - their content, their opinions - interleaved, as if each is trying to convince the other of its own point of view. This picture shows that «being right» is a complex matter and one that requires an elevated perspective.
We find the same question in English, too, for example on a multicoloured paper more than two metres high that is now in the photography collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
So the question is clearly important to Wolfgang Tillmans. Presumably because it encourages us to explore the broad expanse between subjective and objective, opinion and fact, fictional and actual space - and its openness seems to be reflected in the ambiguous, coloured framing.

For Tillmans, engaging with images (and text) can potentially help us to better understand what our eyes do with our thoughts; and his images urge us to look closely in order to identify as many aspects of a situation as possible. Images, Wolfgang Tillmans tells us, can help us to view things from a variety of perspectives - and so not rush to judgement in the certainty that we are right. Because «being right» is mostly founded on a single point of view. Consequently, we cling tenaciously to our position, believing it to be the only correct one; and the more counterarguments we hear, the more vehemently we do so. Psychologists call this the «backfire» or «boomerang effect» - a behavior that rarely leads to constructive progress.
As you can see, the work of Wolfgang Tillmans has a lot to do with conscious seeing, open-minded reflection, a perception that is willing to appreciate new things. To achieve this, Tillmans has chosen the medium of photography, because it is the most versatile, flexible and diverse medium - and because these days you do not even need a camera for it. More on that later.

It was just the same exactly 200 years ago, in 1826 - before photography was «officially» invented by Louis Daguerre - when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce - a Frenchman, like Daguerre - exposed a small tin plate that he had coated with bitumen dissolved in lavender oil - and so captured the view from the window of his studio.
It is reasonable to regard Wolfgang Tillmans as an experimenter in the same vein as Niépce. Like his predecessor, Tillmans seeks from the outset to «transform light into colourings on paper» - an «endlessly wondrous process», as he himself put it. So photography itself is not the only thing that stimulates Wolfgang Tillmans to produce art: rather, he is chiefly interested in the potential of the photographic medium to translate the world's complexity and ambiguity into images, the ideas that go with it, but also the feelings - the rational and the human, the clear and the mysterious at the same time.

It all began around 40 years ago: Wolfgang Tillmans was 18 or 19 years old when he discovered a digital black-and-white laser copier - a novelty at the time - in a photocopying shop in his home town of Remscheid in North Rhine-Westphalia, which converted originals into digital signals that could be enlarged up to 400% and thus rasterised at will. Tillmans used this to edit his own images and others drawn from the media, playing with pigment particles, raster dots, contrasts, streaks and paper structures to create uniquely distorted image effects. Working with the copier was a watershed moment in Wolfgang Tillmans's artistic career, even before he began using a camera professionally.

In 1990, Wolfgang Tillmans went to England, living first in Bournemouth, where he studied art at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design, before moving to London in 1992. There, he began photographing those immediately around him: people from the techno, rave and club scenes and the LGBTQ+ community. His photos were published in music and lifestyle magazines, and Wolfgang Tillmans quickly became known as a documenter of current trends in society. At the time, however, there was no hint of just how style-defining and iconic that aesthetic would one day become, making Tillmans a pioneering artist of his generation internationally. That was partly because in the early 1990s, photography's artistic value was not as widely recognized as it is today, and it was regarded more as a medium for commercial work. However, the subjective approach continued to typify Tillmans's artistic practice; it allowed him to capture an attitude to life, both his own and that of a specific generation, one that also reflected a political image consciousness founded on openness and solidarity with otherness. Here we see the model Kate Moss, aged 22 at the time, wearing a transparent top by Alexander McQueen.

Along with the portraits, Tillmans has also created still lifes, landscapes and skyscapes as well as abstract works, although he has never been concerned with genres as such. Rather, everything we see in his images exists side by side. He dismantles traditional subject hierarchies long prescribed by art history, and removes from the conventional worldview anything that compartmentalises, gentrifies, transfigures or explains.

This soon showed through in Wolfgang Tillmans's exhibition practice as well: in 1993, he had his first solo show at Galerie Buchholz & Buchholz in Cologne, which can be seen as a milestone not just in his career but also in contemporary photography. Here, for the first time, viewers could experience the then still-unfamiliar, non-hierarchical approach to installations that would later become his trademark. Wolfgang Tillmans combined conventional photographic prints, photocopies and original magazine pages, according equal status to each by attaching them directly to the wall using adhesive tape and tacks, freely and without frames. This was totally new: for Tillmans, a printed magazine graphic had the same artistic value as a laboratory print. The installation, in its original configuration, can now be found in the Museum Brandhorst in Munich.

In 1994, Wolfgang Tillmans went to New York, where he immersed himself in the art, music and gay scenes, visited museums and found his first gallerist in the US, Andrea Rosen, with whom he staged a number of exhibitions. While there, he also met the painter Jochen Klein from Munich, who became his life partner and collaborator. The pair lived together on 14th Street in Manhattan, which Tillmans also documented in a half-hour video, adding film to his artistic repertoire. One of the images created in New York depicts the encounter between Jochen Klein and a wild but trusting deer on the Fire Island peninsula; it is one of Tillmans's most moving works, capturing an intimate, even magical moment between human and animal. The celebrated image is now in MoMA, New York, the Guggenheim Museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.
In 1996, Tillmans and Klein returned to London. The following year, Jochen Klein died from an AIDS-related illness at the age of just 30.

In the late 1990s, abstract images fashioned from the interplay of mineral and chemical processes signalled a new phase in the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. They were created entirely without a camera. They can be traced back to the «Silver» works made some years earlier, when Tillmans purchased his first film processor and began experimenting with laboratory processes. To make these abstract images, Tillmans passed photographic paper, either unexposed or previously exposed to a number of coloured light sources, through the uncleaned machine which contained water as well as traces of used chemicals, notably silver nitrate. During the development process, the silver salts react unpredictably with the paper, creating delicate streaks of colour and glistening metallic effects but also scratches, pressure points and deposits that change not only the colour but also the physical surface of the photographic paper. The novel, poetic image structures reinvent photography as a pictorial medium, allowing it to float free from its previous history. Perhaps that is also why his most famous group of abstract works is entitled «Freischwimmer», or «Free Swimmers»; unlike the «Silver» pieces, they were made by Tillmans using a dry process in the darkroom.

In 2000, Wolfgang Tillmans became the first photographer and artist born outside the United Kingdom to win the prestigious Turner Prize. Since then, his work has received numerous awards and, especially over the last five years, been widely exhibited.
In 2022, he presented «Schall ist flüssig» (Sound is Liquid) at MUMOK in Vienna. That same year, his exhibition «To look without fear» was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before moving in 2023 to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2025, he showed «Weltraum» at the Albertinum in Dresden, and that same year saw the opening of what I believe to be his finest exhibition, in Paris at arguably still the most visionary museum architecture in Europe: the Centre Pompidou. Designed by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the cultural centre was inaugurated in 1977 in the Les Halles district at the heart of the city. Almost 50 years later, in 2025, the entire complex was closed for extensive renovation work which is scheduled for completion in 2030. But immediately before the closure, Wolfgang Tillmans was invited to put on an exhibition in the rooms of the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Bpi). He left a large number of the original fittings in place, including the old carpets, signage and the furniture with the monitors used by researchers, allowing his works to engage in dialogue with these striking surroundings.

In all his exhibitions, but especially the one at the Centre Pompidou, we can trace how Wolfgang Tillmans has continually extended the installation concepts he developed in the early 1990s, revealing his ability to place his images in a wide range of configurations and contexts and play magisterially with our visual conventions and, in particular, the expressive potentials of the photographic.
Alongside the wall installations, he arranged pages from books and magazine articles, postcards, packaging and other collected materials on long tables into what he called his «Truth Study Center», created in 2005 to give ironic expression to our vain longing for a universally valid truth.

What comes through most strongly in Tillmans's exhibitions is his interest in the material aspect of his images: the paper, which for him is more than simply an image carrier. Paper is, in a sense, the protagonist of his work groups entitled «paper drop» (2001 onwards) and «Lighter» (2006 onwards). In the former, sheets of paper are rolled into sculptural objects and photographed with a shallow depth of field; in the latter, folded or bent photographic paper is shaped into reliefs, whose newly created «bodies» nevertheless appear «lighter». The architectural space has always been part of Wolfgang Tillmans's images; but with the «Lighter» reliefs and, in particular, his exhibition designs, he has transformed photography itself into a space. This freewheeling, flexible approach to photography, I would stress once again, has made Tillmans a pioneer of art and photographic history, and exerts a powerful influence on subsequent generations of artists to this day.

Another reason that Wolfgang Tillmans is influential is that, as I mentioned at the beginning, his art is authentic and naturally linked to social responsibility. In 2006, he opened the «Between Bridges» off-space in the building housing his London studio. There, he mainly exhibited artists who, in his view, were not receiving sufficient attention. In 2014, it relocated to Berlin, and since 2017, «Between Bridges» has also been the name of a foundation set up by Wolfgang Tillmans. It promotes art, advocates for humanity, solidarity and the strengthening of democracy, and supports LGBTQ+ rights and anti-racist activities. As «Between Bridges» attests, Wolfgang Tillmans sees culture as a vital space for dialogue, empathy and shared values.

His anti-Brexit campaign for an open and democratic Europe, which he launched himself in 2016 and was continued as a poster campaign and T-shirt initiative for the European elections, reflects a quiet yet determined form of moral courage, defending freedoms, combating indifference and encouraging involvement in democratic life. There can be no better time to emphasise that art is perhaps the most effective tool of social engagement, one that we should always use and deploy everywhere.

«How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?» is how I quoted Wolfgang Tillmans at the beginning of my address, and my answer today is this: It is very likely that the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation is right to honour Wolfgang Tillmans for his life's work - which is still far from finished - and present him today with the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2026.