Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery

Entry: Free

I didn't know anything about Wolfgang Tillmans going into this exhibition. Reading about him on Wikipedia afterwards I learnt that he was the first photographer and the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. He won in 2000 with a photograph of Concorde and while I'm not impressed by the photograph, (I think it's fairly bland to be honest), the Guardian have an article written by Tillmans all about the process of taking the picture that's very interesting. Given how controversial the Turner Prize has become in recent years it seems like winning it might be something of a poisoned chalice though. Certainly, people will have very clear opinions about what sort of an artist you are based on that information alone.

Of course, I went in not knowing any of this, and I'm glad this was the case. I knew that it would include Tillmans' figurative and abstract work from the last 10 years, but that was all. (I didn't even realise that he was a photographer until I was working out how to get to the Serpentine.) I'd expected to enjoy the figurative stuff more than the abstract, however, it turns out that most of Tillmans' figurative work is like his Turner Prize winner – bland and not actually that memorable. A number of his photographs were reproduced in the standard 5”x3.75” format normally used for holiday snaps, giving me the weird feeling that some visitor had stuck their own pictures all over the gallery walls.

The abstract work on the other hand was beautiful. Tillmans has taken two different approaches to his abstract photography, one is to zoom right in on an image to remove all contextual clues from it, and the other involves playing with the colours and textures that can be achieved with photographic paper. The first approach yields images like “Paper Drop”, where a piece of paper curled up on itself becomes something else entirely, while the second creates images such as “Ostgut Freischwimmer” and “Lighter AC1”. The latter category includes images that are not images, but pieces of photographic paper that have been coloured, folded and creased, and are more akin to sculptural objects than photographs.

It's a substantial show and there's a huge range of work here, but to me the figurative stuff doesn't really justify its place in a gallery. Surely if I'm supposed to be admiring it then it has to be worthy of admiration? Or is there a Duchamp-esque belief behind it that it's worthy of admiration purely because of its place in a gallery? (You see, this is why the Turner Prize has so many detractors.) However, Tillmans' experiments with colour and texture made the journey to west London a worthwhile one for me.