Exciting news from the Walker…
Wolfgang Tillmans
Turner-prize winning artist exhibits at the Walker Art Gallery
A group of works by German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans goes on public display for the first time among the Walker Art Gallery’s permanent collection, during the Liverpool Biennial from 18 September to 12 December 2010.
The exhibition features nine photographic works, dating from 2004 to 2009, recently acquired by the Arts Council, as well as a number of works from Tillmans’ own collection.
The photographs will be displayed as installations and interventions, curated by Tillmans, around the gallery.
The installations reflect the artist’s very personal response to the Walker Art Gallery’s distinguished permanent collection drawing out connections between his own work and traditional genres such as still life, landscape and portraiture. His selection ranges across a broad span of art history, including the gallery’s medieval and renaissance collection, a painting by one of Liverpool’s most famous artists, George Stubbs and contemporary masters, such as Patrick Caulfield.
The Walker Art Gallery’s head of fine art, Ann Bukantas says: “We are very excited to be working with Wolfgang Tillmans on this exhibition which promises to reinterpret some of the Walker Art Gallery’s best-known works.
“For an artist like Tillmans the installation functions as a work of art in its own right. Through his interventions he invites us to consider the relationship between works and the locations in which they sit, rather than simply looking at an individual piece.
“Tillmans is one of the most exciting and innovative artists of his generation so we are thrilled to be showing his work during the Liverpool Biennial and we are very grateful to the Arts Council Collection for making it possible to bring such an important group of works to the Walker Art Gallery.”
Head of the Arts Council Collection, Caroline Douglas says: “We are delighted to be able to debut this outstanding new acquisition at the Walker Art Gallery. The project is emblematic of the kind of imaginative collaboration the Arts Council Collection can have with important museums in Britain. The exhibition demonstrates that art is a continuum, across centuries, a conversation that goes on beyond generations and one that we are all a part of.”
The Arts Council acquired the nine works by Tillmans as a partial gift from the artist and with a grant from leading independent charity The Art Fund.