Since establishing his reputation in the youth and club culture of 1990s London, Tillmans has become one of the most influential artists of our time. His continued exploration of photography as a means to communicate reality is one that inspires and moves in its wonder and its intelligence.

For his first exhibition in Portugal, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Remscheid, Germany) continues to expand the possibilities for the reception of his oeuvre through a radical repositioning of its multiple dimensions. At Serralves, he pays particular attention to what he describes as his ‘Vertical Landscapes’, photographs of the natural phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth, cloud meets sky. Dating from 1995 until the present, and printed in scales ranging from the standard size of photographic printing paper, to the panoramic expanse of four metres in size, the photographs encapsulate the expressive potential of Tillmans' highly developed visual formalism, and his engagement with photography as inherently physical as it is immaterial. In their unnerving beauty, produced partially by the camera makers technical advances and partly by the photographer's insistence on allowing those advances to show, they create a challenge to the canon of visual cool preeminent in today's visual culture.

Language: English, Portuguese