Wolfgang Tillmans — Glade / Clairière — Chantal Crousel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 4 days: September 5 → October 10, 2026

At the heart of the exhibition lies a reflection on the line, a discreet yet essential motif that has run through Wolfgang Tillmans’s work for many years. At times it is drawn, deliberate, carefully composed in both its placement and its colour. At others, it emerges from an encounter with the world itself, revealing a productive tension between control and surrender. In Tillmans’s practice, the line arises from two seemingly contradictory impulses. On the one hand, there is the constructed gesture, fully conscious of its effects. On the other, there is a trust placed in the world, invited to participate in the making of the image rather than merely being recorded by it. What might appear as an opposition between calculation and intuition, intention and accident, ultimately dissolves within the finished work, where such distinctions give way to a unified visual experience.

This attention to the very conditions through which an image comes into being permeates Tillmans’s practice as a whole. Since the 1980s, the artist has developed a body of work grounded in the careful observation of the realities he encounters, while simultaneously questioning them. His photographs appear as fragments of lived experience, yet they also remind us that reality is never simply given. It is shaped by the gazes, choices and constructions through which we engage with it. Portraits, everyday objects, landscapes, natural forms and architectural structures are approached with equal intensity, free from any hierarchy of subject or value. The same attentiveness to detail, light and the mechanisms of perception connects these images and forms the sensitive thread running throughout the exhibition.

One year after the close of his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, and following a year spent teaching as a visiting professor at the École des Beaux Arts de Paris, Wolfgang Tillmans returns to Galerie Chantal Crousel. This return extends a long standing and ever evolving dialogue with the French capital, a continuous conversation of which this exhibition marks a new chapter.