Wolfgang Tillmans
Keep Movin’
January 15–March 1, 2026
Press preview with the artist: Thursday, January 15, 2026, 11 am–12 pm
Opening reception: Thursday, January 15, 2026, 6–8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to present Keep Movin’, Wolfgang Tillmans’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery since 1995. Following a year of ambitious institutional presentations at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus Cleff, Remscheid; and the Albertinum, Dresden, and the inclusion in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, this exhibition highlights core themes of Tillmans’s practice through new photographs, videos, sculptural installations, and a new iteration of Truth Study Center.
Examining how his distinct visual language and conceptual interests have evolved over time, the exhibition reflects the artist’s long-standing understanding of his work as situated between the physical realities of the world he inhabits and the sociopolitical, sensual, and spiritual concerns that anchor his practice.
In the center of the exhibition space, Tillmans presents large industrial ropes—some coiled on the floor, others resting on tables set atop mirrored surfaces. These hawser shackles are a direct reference to a waterlogged rope the artist encountered on Fire Island. Originally engineered to tow ships, these hawser shackles are shown as material objects whose scale, weight, and construction become newly legible in the gallery setting, suggesting the tenuous connections and fragile infrastructures that underpin today’s information systems. Their positioning emphasizes their physical presence while also evoking their function of connection and support, whether between vessels or, more abstractly, between bodies and spaces. To Tillmans, these ropes speak as a potent language in these unmoored times.
The ropes are integrated into a new iteration of Truth Study Center (2005–ongoing), a continuously updated body of work in which Tillmans distills texts, fragments, ephemera, images, and his own works to freely investigate and expose strategies of both information and misinformation shaping contemporary discourse and perception. These horizontal table arrangements probe the ever-changing construction of reality through both aesthetic and political lenses.
Curled (2025) extends the artist’s early photocopier experiments and exemplifies Tillmans’s interest in eliciting striking results from minimal means: materials arranged on the copier’s surface are scanned, enlarged, inverted, and abstracted, generating textures, traces and forms while revisiting the humble accessibility of the photocopy machine as a generative tool for image-making.
In Panorama, left (2006/2024), folded paper strips stand on the glass of a photocopier, their three-dimensionality producing sharp lines and faint shadows. Using the photocopier’s four colors, Panorama, left develops a beige tonal range and recalls the negative of a photograph, harkening back to avant-gardist experiments. The image has appeared in Truth Study Center installations as well as in Tillmans’s book manual (2007). In 2024, he returned to the original photocopy and expanded it into a new artwork measuring six metres in length. At this scale, the myriad individual laser-copy lines become visible as fine graphic details, while smudges on the glass emerge as both traces of the machine and pictorial elements.
In Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions—a large-scale installation first conceptualized and exhibited in 2006 and recreated for Tillmans’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2025—the artist responds to the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. Tillmans observed that among the numerous memorials in the United States, there were none for the victims of organized religions, living or dead. This lack is addressed with a temporary and formally abstract monument, which only reveals its purpose through its name. The work disrupts the authoritarian absolutism of the grid through subtle gestures: creased and scratched photographs, the slight changes from dark blue to black, and the optical illusion of a black dot at the intersection of the pictures, only noticeable upon closer inspection.
Two new video works, which premiered in Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in summer 2025, demonstrate Tillmans’s distinctive approach to the moving image, into which he has been increasingly integrating his exploration of sound and music. Wild Carrot (2025) revolves around the flower of a wild carrot in nature, accompanied by the artist playing the kalimba. The video’s shifting focus and close attention to minute detail evoke the camera’s ability to describe three-dimensional presence and invite contemplation of natural form. Travelling Camera (2025) resembles a drone flight over a dense urban landscape, yet unfolds across the hidden infrastructure of a first-generation 4K monitor. Circuit boards, inverters, and cables form a technological “terrain” that Tillmans overlays with organic and cultural fragments—sand dollars from Ghana, vintage postage stamps, rusted metal—linking the polished mechanisms of modern image production with tactile, analogue objects. The camera transforms this still arrangement into a landscape and a meditation on the intertwined histories of technology, matter, and time.
A significant group of photographs was taken at a metalworking factory in Remscheid, the city where Tillmans was born. Prompted by an invitation to exhibit at Haus Cleff in April 2025, these works bring together his portraiture as well as social and industrial photography. Remscheid’s long tradition of toolmaking—once a pillar of West Germany’s post-war “economic miracle”— forms the backdrop for pictures that depict workers, machinery, and scenes of molten steel. Through Tillmans’s attentive gaze, the factory’s architecture and processes become objects of wonder, revealing the perpetual fragility of seemingly fixed structures. The vivid depiction of molten steel, the clarity of the workers’ gazes, and visual echoes of New Objectivity merge into an intimate portrayal of a local industry facing profound transformation. These photographs speak to home, change, heritage, and the latent metaphysics of the everyday, while also engaging with the evolving functions, possibilities and responsibilities of image-making itself.
Tillmans’s deep interest in materiality and the foundations of photographic process—rooted in minerals, chemistry, and the transformation of matter—is reflected in his continued experimentation with paper, light, and reproduction. The Time Flows All Over works use light contamination in the darkroom to produce cameraless drawings on paper. The Lighter works, begun in 2005, are made by Tillmans in darkness by manually exposing folded photographic paper to coloured light sources. The resulting object, framed in transparent acrylic, oscillates between sculpture and two-dimensional composition, making space for questioning the object’s status.
This exploration of material transformation extends to Tillmans’s longstanding engagement with water as both subject and metaphor. His photographs of seas and rivers foreground water as a fluid in constant motion—a current that connects landscapes, cultures, and bodies. While water’s symbolic role as connector runs through his work, these images also insist on the specificity of place. Surfaces reveal plastic debris, industrial residue, or the quiet imprint of urban life. Such details root the pictures firmly in the present, acknowledging how natural flows are shaped—and often damaged—by human activity. In this interplay between the universal and the particular, Tillmans reflects on states of transition, thresholds between nature and culture, and the fragile interdependence that defines contemporary existence. Water, in its many aggregate states, becomes both material and metaphor for liquidity, contingency, and renewal.
Throughout the exhibition, Tillmans emphasizes interconnectedness—between people, materials, histories, and images. His work is marked by a deep sensitivity to the interweaving of past and present, the fragility of seemingly stable structures, and the transformation of matter from one state to another. In the artist’s words, “Everything is matter continually renewing itself and transforming from one aggregate state into another.” This understanding shapes a practice that continually explores the translation between three-dimensional and two-dimensional space, the poetry inherent in such shifts, and the evolving material conditions of photographic seeing.
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Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968 Remscheid, Germany) studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, United Kingdom, graduating in 1992. He lives and works in Berlin and London, and is currently visiting professor at Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Recent solo exhibitions include Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us at Centre Pompidou (June–September 2025); Weltraum at the Albertinum, Dresden (March–July 2025); and Ausstellung in Remscheid at Haus Cleff through January 24, 2026. Tillmans is included in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2025), Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice through January 11, 2026.
The survey exhibition To look without fear was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2023). Other solo exhibitions include Fragile, a touring exhibition of the artist’s work that opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and travelled throughout Africa, with the last venue at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria (2022); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna (2021); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2020); Carré d'Art — Nîmes Museum of Contemporary Art, France (2018); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2018); Tate Modern, London (2017); Beyeler Foundation, Basel (2017); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2016); National Museum of Art, Osaka (2015); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2013); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2013); Kunsthalle Zürich (2012); among others.
Tillmans has been awarded the Goslar Kaiserring Prize (2018), Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015), Royal Academician Award (2014), Turner Prize (2001), Ars Viva Prize (1995), and Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße (1995).
Work by the artist is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Portrait Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among many others.