The Financial Times, review by Jackie Wullschläger
2025
It’s the last fling: the furniture has gone, bare rooms echo, you notice how filthy the carpets are, and the party is wild but mournful. So it is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, shutting this summer for five years’ refurbishment, its collection already relocated. Host for the closing bash is Wolfgang Tillmans, the German photographer who made his name taking pictures of 1990s rave culture and gay nightclubs, and won the Turner Prize in 2000. Entitled Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us, his exhibition dovetails highlights from those heady days with images seen through the darkening glass of recent years. It is the best show of his career.
Invited to occupy the Pompidou’s library, the Bibliothèque publique d’information, Tillmans curates an immense emptiness. Only a handful of books, shelves, computer terminals remain, dotted across 6,000 sq metres of grubby grey carpet. Disconsolate signage — “Politique”, “Education”, “Philosophie” — dangles over nothing. On the walls, Tillmans answers the silence with hundreds of his globe-trotting, sewer-to-sky images, spanning four decades: “rat disappearing”, “Tongues and Ears”, “tree filling window”, “Lagos Night Drive”, “Playing Cards, Hong Kong”, “Rock from Cameroon on Bread”, the flat rectangle “Himmelblau”.
