Wolfgang Tillmans

With titles such as Susanne, No Bra (2006) and Anders pulling splinter from his foot (2004), Wolfgang Tillmans’s oeuvre is distinguished by unabashed emotion and a tension between strangeness and familiarity. Using all the photographic technology at his disposal, Tillmans shoots portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes in which the subjects range from partially-nude friends in seemingly private moments to modest arrangements of domestic items on windowsills. Tillmans’s abstractions reveal studies in color, as seen in the magenta liquid lines of Urgency XXIV (2006).

German, b. 1968