Wolfgang Tillmans, Nothing could have prepared us. Everything could have prepared us @ Centre Pompidou

Installation view on empty shelves of the public library

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has been given carte blanche at the Pompidou Centre for a few months before the cultural mecca shuts down for five years of renovations. The simple activity of entering the Pompidou to visit this exhibition is a novel experience, even for those of us who are regulars. Visitors must cross the empty ground floor, walk up stairs, then take an escalator through a space not previously accessible to the public. On arrival at the second floor, having completed this unusual traversal of space, we enter the old public library. All other areas are boarded up. Even before I reached the entrance to Tillmans' exhibition, I was happy to be there. 

Installation view

I had taken my time to visit this exhibition because I am not a big Tillmans fan, but seeing so much of his work in one place — and in this space — was rewarding. Tillmans' photography is often not aesthetically pleasing, which is part of the point, and also, one of the reasons I am not always drawn in. That said, there are works that are highly aestheticized—particularly those in which he experiments with photographic materials and light. More often exhibited in France is Tillmans' vast collection of personal and public photographs resembling something like an amateur archive of images depicting his journey through a changing world. As a body of work, these photographs make visible every day life over the past fifty years. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Resolute Rave, 2020

I was surprised to see so many hip young people at the exhibition, because Tillmans' world is historical and presumably unknown to many of the visitors. Because Tillmans is my generation, his world is very familiar, and hence, I  enjoyed seeing the breadth of his vision across decades. Under glass over five tables, Tillmans has curated photographs, programs, flyers, books from the past five decades. I spent a lot of time in Berlin in the 1990s and 2000s, and the immediate post-wall Berlin of Tillmans' generation was the same one that I skulked around in those years. The ecstasy nightclub scene, grunge living, and the freedom of a world seemingly without limits, in a united, undeveloped Berlin. It is a city that we will never know again in our lifetimes. Perusing Tillmans' photographs of Berlin in those years, I looked with nostalgia, and grateful to have been a part of during an extraordinary period in history. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Renzo Piano, 2024

Tillmans was given carte blanche to do as he wished, and perhaps the most interesting thing about the exhibition is that his installations are always in dialogue with the space. Whether it is a mirrored tabletop at which we peer and see the exposed pipes and ducts of the Pompidou ceiling, empty shelves of the one time library—the shelves of the arts and humanities being emptied while the scientific ones are filled with space travel books to indicate the state of knowledge today—a photograph of Renzo Piano in front of the building he designed, or photographs of the space we are in, Tillmans constantly reflects on the radical architecture of the Pompidou building. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 234, 2024

Among Tillmans most stunning works are the Freischwimmer and Greifbar works - images that he makes using different light sources in the darkroom without a camera. Huge abstract works that look like ink dye playing on surfaces, and in some, creatures busily fanning across paper. The colours he finds through light play in the process of image production are sumptuous, always different. Similarly, the Silver works remind of carefully worked abstract paintings. Photographic paper is fed through used developer triggering chemical reactions. The resultant images are varied, appearing to be marked, blemished by the silver salts of the paper. Over time, we see that they are gorgeous, but enigmatic. And then, over time, their appearance as something that they are not, disappears.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Paper Drop (green), 2011

Lastly, a lot of fun was to be had by visitors who spent time lounging around, talking, searching at computer stations - just as they did in the old library. Nothing could have prepared us. Everything could have prepared us was an experience as much as it was a visit to an art exhibition.So yes, I had a fun time at the Tillmans' exhibition, and I would highly recommend it as a lovely goodbye to the Pompidou as it goes on its five year restoration journey. 

Corps et âmes @ Bourse de Commerce / Pinault Collection

Duane Hanson, House Painter, 1984-88

It was wonderful to be back at the Bourse de Commerce in the final days of their summer show, Body and Soul. The place was teeming with visitors, in fact, I have never seen it so full on a Friday afternoon. It seems that visitors to Paris have discovered this, one of Paris's newest cultural pearls. Because of the crowds, I skipped the rotunda sound installation in which visitors sat in silence watching bowls floating on water. Instead, I followed the fascinating exhibition of Ali Cherri's sculptures in the twenty-four vitrines around the perimeter. Cherri's provocative sculptures begun from recycled archaeological finds—broken limbs, scarred bodies, decapitated heads—made for unsettling viewing. In this installation, Cherri brings the past into the present and reminds his viewer of the imbrication of spoils of war, history, and culture. 

Ali Cherri, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), after Velázquez, 2022

Two films by African American artist Arthur Jafa were among the most powerful works in the exhibition. Downstairs Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) is a collage of clips showing the history of African American life in the twentieth century. Weaving together recognizeable figures in often quoted images such as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Barack Obama —all of whom claim a message of love, tolerance, inclusivity—and footage of anonymous men, women, children being beaten, dragged along the street, and terrorized by the police. Love may well be the message, but the language of death is the only vocabulary American society knows when speaking to African Americans. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam overlays the images, successfully moving the viewer from the emotive power of cultural icons through the horror of police brutality towards African Americans. More than one person (including me) left the screening room in tears.  

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, (2021)

Jafa's Aghdra (2021) in the ground floor galleries was more enigmatic, but still overwhelming in a different way. Slabs of what look like broken bitumen (digitally generated) roll around where we expect to see ocean waves under a rising sun, a setting moon in a clear sky. The black sludge or magma travel towards us, threatening to envelop us, and then they rise so high in the frame that they covers the sky. From where we sit, there is no escape once the horror of this stuff threatens to bury us. The message is clear: the sea is not the same phenomenon for everyone. We think of it as a place to go for a holiday and dream and fall in love. For African Americans, the sea is the reminder of transportation and colonialism, enslavement and entrapment to the designs of a perpetrator. 

Philip Guston, Lamp, 1974

Though it was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition, it was not clear to me how Philip Guston's Lamp, 1974 was related to the themes of body and soul, the exhibition title. While Guston's work from this period is known for its conversation on questions of racism, Lamp is more abstract, discoursing on looking and reflection in absent space. Painted in Guston's signature pinks with flecks of grey, it is a luscious painting in which brushstrokes enigmatically travel around the canvas, thus the room in which the lamp sits. Light spills out of the lamp, but there is nothing to illuminate. The lampshade with its caresses of white and grey, glimmers of peppermint green, verges into being an image on a wall. It is a painting about light in which nothing is illuminated, there is nothing to see in an empty room, thus turning the attention back on the viewer as the one who is looking and looked at. There is a curious red line drawn horizontally through the middle of the painting, like a cord. Is it a trail of blood? Or is it a definition of the wall behind the lamp. It's hard to say. 

Marlene Dumas, Horizon, 2007-2008

In the upstairs galleries, a richness of works is displayed, again with varying degrees of relevance to the title of the exhibition. Standing out for me were works by Marlene Dumas. In a more unusual work, Horizon, Dumas paints the flowers on her mother's grave and thinks of it as a portrait. As if drifting out towards the horizon at the back of the painting, the flowers are framed by the slight hint of a grave. Or perhaps they are in a vitrine, displayed for us to admire as we walk past? The work speaks to questions of death and eternity, suggesting the preservation of life in memory after death. The blue paint is complex and suggests the changing mood of the water into which her mother's memory floats. With Dumas, it's so often about death, looking, and our ultimate blindness.

Corps et âmes, Installation View
Foreground: Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana Noire, 1965

I think I am not a theme exhibition person. With my need for order and coherence, I am always looking for continuity in an exhibition, something much easier to find in an author-centered exhibition. Body and Soul had many breathtaking works—from Man Ray to Mira Schor—but as is often the case, it felt scattered. It's a little difficult to say what exactly the exhibition wanted to show about the body and soul—particularly, as you can see, some of the most impressive works were about the absence of the body. Maybe the problem was the title? If the exhibition had been called something like "Invisible Bodies," it would have made more sense.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Georg Baselitz, Traumflug sex, 2025

I loved the paintings and was moved by this exhibition as what might be seen as a sort of treatise on aging, the deterioration of the body, and the associated challenges. Moreover, the interaction of Baselitz's paintings and Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space were enthralling. I visited the exhibition in the early evening when the shadows cast by the latticed roof of the former ironwork factory were long, and in the heat, they were strong. Falling over the enormous paintings, creating patterns as if further caging the figures in their bodies aleady trapped inside the paintings' frames, and again on the walls, the shadows became integral to the works. The vision was quite spectacular. This was further underlined by the fact that the galleries were all but empty of visitors, so I had the pleasure of being with the paintings alone.

Georg Baselitz, Idigene kunst von damals, 2025

It was only after a little research that I understood the curious exhibition title, translated from the German as, A Leg By Manet from Paris. Apparently, Manet had difficulty painting legs, though I can be forgiven for not knowing this because in the nineteenth century, legs were not exactly on display. Manet's women typically appear in long dresses and men in loose fitting pants. So the connection to Manet is not so obvious, and certainly not visible in the paintings. The title is more about Baselitz than Manet, a reference to his own difficulties with mobility. The title also speaks to Baselitz's career long fascination with feet and hands - usually misshapen in his paintings and oversized in his sculptures. It seems ironic that an artist who has constantly pulled our attention to the feet and hands of his figures should find difficulty walking in later life.

Georg Baselitz, Warum nicht zwei, 2025

Georg Baselitz, Waren die Indigenen wirklich diejenigen, 2025

Where many artists accommodate the limitations of an aging body by painting smaller, Baselitz has gone bigger and included the traces of his negotiation of bigger canvases in the paintings themselves. Legs and mobility (or lack of it) are a major theme in these works that include the tracks left by his wheelchair as he skirts around in the painting process. There are also footprints, drips, smudges and other traces of movement as graffiti over the huge canvases. Accompanying the traces of process, misshapen, withering bodies are tenderly painted with Baselitz's familiar sensuous treatment of paint. The colour is usually fleshy, the body in the signature Baselitz upside down pose. And even though there are usually two bodies in the painting—his own and that of his wife—they rarely touch or interact. This sense of isolation is again familiar from decades of Baselitz's painting, but it feels central to the experience of aging as it is shown here.

Georg Baselitz, Verscheiden von den anderen, 2024

Over the years, I have read many critiques of Baselitz's work on the basis of his apparent misogyny. While he may well denigrate women, there is nothing in these paintings to support this. His aesthetic is one that reflects the human inevitability; we see the body falling, sleeping, in pain. Trapped by the frame, trapped within the body, the self is fragile in a whole new way now that Baseltiz is concerned with age. These are not visions of a self in which the ego is so fragile that it cannot reveal the vulnerability of being human. To my eyes, these paintings have little to do with gender or sexuality. If anything, the fragility of the aging male artist is humble and vulnerable. Self-obsessed maybe, but cruel to women? I don't see that in these paintings.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris
Installation View, Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Another critique often leveled at Baselitz's work is that the upside down figures are a gimmick that he has exploited for commercial and art world attention. It is true that he paints them over and over again, but here, the motif is not without motivation. The upside down body and supine bodies speak to its destabilization and incapacitation with age. Where bifurcation was once of Germany, in this exhibition, the doubled Baselitz paintings represent himself and his wife. In one painting, the two figures look as though they could be lying in their coffins - the body not simply withered, but dead. Together. Again, they might be bifurcated, but the meaning of the twin figures has shifted and is not without deeper relevance.