Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing Could Have Prepared Us - Everything Could Have Prepared Us

From June 13 to September 22, 2025, the Centre Pompidou is giving carte blanche to the artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who has come up with an original project to round off the programming of the Paris building. Occupying the entire second floor of the Public Information Library (Bpi), Tillmans's experimental installation transforms the space, establishing a dialogue with the former library and questioning it both as architecture and as a locus for the transmission of knowledge. The exhibition explores over thirty-five years of artistic practice through various photographic genres and constitutes another, very personal representation of his universe, whose order and logic are activated in response to the library space. The catalog traces this unique project. On the spreads of the section featuring the plates, images of the works alternate with numerous installation shots that show how the artist has made this space his own. A varied selection of essays by a younger generation of authors sheds new light on the various aspects of Tillmans's work. Wolfgang Tillmans is an artist based in Berlin and London. A recent retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Florian Ebner is head of the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou. Olga Frydryszak-Rétat is assistant curator at the Department of Photography, Centre Pompidou, specializing in contemporary photography.