Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who currently moves in the highest circles of the international art world, has descended from his artistic Mount Olympus to return to his modest hometown of Remscheid, Germany. The celebrated artist, who presently has a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, recently showed at the Albertinum in Dresden, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York just a few years ago, has brought his work back to the city of 113,000 residents south of Wuppertal where he grew up, or "opjewassen" as they say in the local Bergisch dialect.
This remarkable circumstance means that viewers can currently see Tillmans' photographs both in the technoid, postmodern halls designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in Paris and in the baroque rooms of a patrician house in Remscheid. The exhibition venue, Haus Cleff, represents a significant piece of Remscheid's historical timeline. In the 1790s, the Hilger brothers constructed this building as a symbol of their prosperity, wealth they had accumulated through tool production, which remains a major industry in Remscheid to this day. Various mayors lived in this house over the years, and it later served as the city archive before eventually becoming part of the German Tool Museum.
The remnants of a kitchen still visible today have witnessed nearly everything imaginable over the past 240 years: banquets, gluttony, and most recently, a destructive beetle infestation that cost the city of Remscheid 8 million euros to combat, forcing the house to remain closed for the last ten years. Now, with the reopening of Haus Cleff, magenta and blue streaks from Tillmans' renowned "Freischwimmer" (Free Swimmer) series stretch across meters of wall space in the old kitchen, flowing into one another like liquid art.
In this experimental photography series, there is no actual subject matter in the traditional sense. What viewers see are images of skillfully applied developer fluid that paints ephemeral clouds onto photographic paper. The Freischwimmer series, which helped establish Tillmans' international reputation, along with his countless documentary photographs that explore the narrow space between authenticity and staging, oscillates between abstract and concrete throughout the pastel-colored chambers, rooms, and hallways of Haus Cleff.
Tillmans' work, created by the photographer born in 1968, sometimes appears like commercial advertising but with a playful, absurd twist. One example is his portrait of a young Kate Moss, who sits upright in a transparent top before an arrangement of potatoes, tomatoes, and strawberries, smiling distantly into the camera. Then suddenly, deeply personal images emerge. A photograph from 1991 shows the artist's mother in an undershirt with a hair dryer hood on her head, captured from behind in front of a chaotic desk.
This special exhibition is not a comprehensive Tillmans retrospective; rather, it is fragmentary and deeply personal in nature. While visitors can trace how the photographer, who now lives in London and Berlin and has emerged as a European activist in recent years, found his way into pop magazines, prestigious art collections worldwide, techno clubs like Berlin's Berghain, and eventually to winning the Turner Prize in 2000, his famous images of queer subculture find little space in Haus Cleff. The representations of homosexual fantasies and the sometimes disparagingly called "freaks" - social outsiders to whom Tillmans has created photographic monuments in their playful nonconformity - are largely absent from this particular show.
Instead, the exhibition focuses on what Tillmans describes as his voluntary return to Remscheid. With "Wolfgang Tillmans. Exhibition in Remscheid," the laconic title of the show, the photographer traces both the history of this Bergisch region city and his own personal story within it. He showcases the city's industry, its machines, and its workers. He sensually and materially stages protective clothing, glowing metals, and meter-high saw blades from the local Lennartz company.
His color-saturated photographs from a production hall of the Dirostahl steel factory appear close but not sentimental, almost casual in their approach. A worker looks into the camera with pursed lips and tired eyes, having apparently just turned toward it. His face shield is flipped back, sitting like a golden bishop's miter above his head. Tillmans' documentary approach is constantly interrupted by his advertising aesthetic, and sometimes the photographs seem to come from an image campaign by the Federal Ministry of Economics promoting Germany as an industrial nation, if the images didn't also contain their own ambivalence.
A diffusely proud "Made in Remscheid" sentiment emerges here, perhaps even a "Wolfgang Made in Remscheid." In a display case at Haus Cleff lie artifacts from his life: loose objects, star charts, headphones. A nostalgic view of his youth in the provinces emerges. Here, someone also remembers why he had to leave in order to be able to return.
The exhibition "Wolfgang Tillmans. Exhibition in Remscheid" runs at Haus Cleff in Remscheid until January 4, 2026, offering visitors a unique opportunity to see how one of the world's most celebrated photographers engages with his roots and the industrial heritage of his hometown.
