Following his retrospectives in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, Wolfgang Tillmans presents now presents his solo exhibition 'Beugung', which has been developed in close collaboration with Kunstverein München.

Taking its starting point from works as 'Sportflecken' (1996), the series of monochrome works that have been emerging since 1997 such as ‘Impossible Colour (Green)’ (1997), and the video piece ‘Lights (Body)’ (2002), the exhibition 'Beugung' attempts a focussed and comprehensive genealogy of the notion of surface in the work of Wolfgang Tillmans.

In 1988, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote: 'thinking means folding'. Deleuze referred hereby to – particularly, though not exclusively – the aesthetics of baroque. According to Deleuze, folds contain a non-readable, a mental potential. Folds cover up structures instead of conclusively defining them – it is a game that always presupposes and establishes a human being as an imaginable creature.

Images and situations are set in relation to each other in order to constitute the visible and the readable in mutual dependency. Everything created is the result of complex folds, each of which has to be understood simultaneously as endless, continuing and interconnected folds, unfolding and covering up – to thus integratively instead of oppositionally relate a human's universal and individual perception and knowledge to each other. The baroque artist was still aware that the world is only ever put into perspective in small ways rather than as a whole.

By consciously focussing on only one aspect of the work of the past 15 years, the exhibition 'Beugung' reveals a close interrelation between singular and on first sight disparate groups of works. As a 'vehicle of critical thought', based on the notion of an active and participatory subject, with 'Beugung' Wolfgang Tillmans presents once again the world not as a static given but as something produced and hence changeable.