Ta-Ta for Now

Sophie van Well Groeneveld visits a Wolfgang Tillmans survey, the final exhibition at Centre Pompidou before its renovation.

By Sophie van Well GroeneveldDecember 21, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Politics

IN THE CITY and the World (2021), Gregor Hens identifies the library as one of the “few places in our modern cities that are freely accessible to everyone, that are truly public and not in thrall to any commercial enterprise” (translation by Jen Calleja). The library is a place to access a free computer, spread out a newspaper, find shelter or somewhere to rest, or maybe borrow tools. Public spaces should be places of repose and regeneration. Can a museum offer this?

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s Rien ne nous y préparait—Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us—Everything could have prepared us) took place in the Centre Pompidou’s vacant library, the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI), on the second floor, the museum’s final exhibition before closing for renovation until 2030. With a somber and nostalgic mood, it made for a fitting last show, as if steeped in longing for the museum on the eve of its closure, as well as for the fleeting moments captured in the photographs. Tillmans never displays his work chronologically, and each of the images—whether from the 1990s or 2025—felt like a document of a bygone time, mournful and out of reach.

Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, Tillmans now lives between London and Berlin. Over three decades, his photographs have covered an astounding range of subjects and genres, from abstractions to portraits to still lifes, often testing the boundaries of the medium. A sense of curiosity and affection permeates his restless documentation of his surroundings. The first photograph seen on entering the show was Money Exchange, Bahnhof Zoo (1990), which portrays men congregating in groups of two outside the S-Bahn station, next to a 2015 image of a peach-and-violet sky over Fire Island. Turning a corner, one encountered The State We’re In, A (2015), a 10 x 13 foot print of a gray, tumultuous sea, hanging from the ceiling, next to a 2010 portrait of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Tillmans is adept at creating these kinds of intuitive and evocative connections between disparate subjects, as seen again and again across the more than 3,000 photographs, grouped in clusters, that fill the walls and other surfaces of the library. Within the pictures, Tillmans has a remarkable gift for capturing intimacy—not just between people but also between people and objects or their surroundings: a nude man in a forest arching his body backwards, his spread-out posture exposing his skeleton; a group of friends lying supine on a mattress with their socked feet touching in the air; shoulders and backs of bodies pressed up against a misty bar window seen from the outside at night; a close-up of a man licking another man’s ear; glasses frames hinging around an ear.

The library, unlike the other floors of the Centre Pompidou, has retained its high ceilings and open-plan layout, covering an area of 65,000 square feet. Clearing the space of furnishings in preparation for the exhibition revealed a long-faded pattern on the gray carpet, a lime-green grid with purple squares. The ceiling is constructed with blue pipes and huge gray beams in a zigzag formation, which Renzo Piano told Tillmans is called the “gerberette,” or the Gerber beam. Piano and Richard Rogers, the Pompidou’s architects, conceived these beams as a core tenet of the museum’s design across all floors, doing away with the need for pillars or columns that would otherwise create separations within the space, while introducing colors and textures that make a less imposing setting than a typical white-wall gallery.

The forthcoming five-year renovation serves to rid the building of asbestos and restore the structure to Piano and Rogers’s original design. Over the years, alterations have been made to the other floors—lower ceilings and partitioned rooms—with only the library remaining largely untouched. In this sense, Tillmans’s exhibition in the BPI, as much as it exuded an air of nostalgia, looked to the future of what the museum will be.

With the freedom to do what he wanted with the space, Tillmans chose to honor Rogers and Piano’s original design, taping and pinning works to the walls rather than adding partitions, and making use of the library’s now-empty gray shelves to hang works from his ongoing chromogenic Lighter series—abstract photos in intense hues of orange, yellow, rust red, and blue. The amber shades in a series of photographs depicting an interior space lit up at golden hour were accentuated against the dull gray-beige of the information desk cubicles on which they were hung.

Tillmans’s earliest works, from the late 1980s, consisted of enlarged grayscale photocopies of images from newspapers. Soon after, he made a name for himself in London photographing gay nightlife, images that were first published in i-D magazine. At the Pompidou, visitors could make their own grayscale photocopies in a copier room down the hall from the exhibition. With many of his nightclub photographs displayed there, the space also offered an ode to dark club corners and the things that happen there, once deemed seedy.

Neighboring the copier room was a red-carpeted space devoid of visual work. There were chairs positioned in a circle facing outward, and sound panels in the walls played Tillmans’s audio piece I want to make a film (2018). The six-minute audio features Tillmans’s low, pause-filled voice, eerily reflecting on the rapid acceleration of smartphone technology in the 2010s. He chronologizes the demise of the stationary computer, recalls taking his first phone photos with the Sony P800 in 2004 and ponders the acceleration of technological change: “Why does it ever get faster? Why do chips get smaller? Why do chips get more powerful? How can you make chips with details that are smaller than the wavelength of light?” I want to make a film presumably would not be listened to so closely if there were images on the walls, but while I sat through the sound piece, the room remained almost entirely empty, people momentarily dipping their heads in. The space demanded the visitor’s attention, if they’d submit to it. I was reminded of Jonathan Crary’s 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, particularly its discussion of the advent of the attention economy and the proposed idea of a continuous interface of unbroken engagement via illuminated screens: in the 1990s, Eric Schmidt, a future Google CEO, predicted that the corporations that would be most successful would be those “maximizing the number of ‘eyeballs’ they could consistently engage and control,” as Crary paraphrases it. Here was one space where visitors could relinquish the constant expectation for the eyes to have a place to land. This installation was a place for eyes to reset, but it seemed to be underutilized.

In the center of the exhibition, a few rows of shelves still stocked with books remained, and next to them a few rows of computers. Tillmans visited the BPI on the last day it was open to the public and recorded videos of people working at the computers. In the exhibition, those same monitors displayed this documentation while also providing visitors the opportunity to peruse Tillmans’s catalog of videos. At one point a mother, and her four sons each sat at a different computer, headphones on, viewing different videos. Watching visitors engage with Tillmans’s work in this space, it seemed that they were both his viewers and his subjects as well.

It wasn’t just the artist’s work that elicited a pang of sentimentality in me but also the opportunity to watch visitors feel a little freer moving around the space. There was a viewing platform (its purpose unclear beyond providing another level to observe the exhibition) accessed by four steps on one side and a ramp on the other, which, as I passed, a child was feverishly rolling down before running back up to do it again. With the shelves and carpets in place, there was a lack of pretension, of formality—everyone appeared more able to submit to the experience.

The exhibition also showcased some of Tillmans’s direct political work, including campaign posters he designed for the European Commission general elections in 2019, saying “Vote Together, Vote for Europe” in 24 languages. Alongside this were remnants of his involvement in the Remain campaign during the Brexit referendum in 2016. Photos of Vivienne Westwood and Daniel Craig modeling his T-shirts—which read “Register to vote by 7th June Don’t Let an Older Generation Decide Your Future” and “No man is an island. No country by itself,” respectively—were stuck next to images from Tillmans’s Instagram account from the time, photos of posters with the message “Say you’re in if you’re in,” held up or stuck to doors. I had entirely forgotten about these efforts for the “In Campaign.” Marches in Hyde Park in London after the outcome of the referendum nine years ago, with placards of the stars of the EU flag reformulated from a circle into a heart, seem incredibly distant today. Perhaps this was meant as a prod to forgo collective amnesia: when there’s such an abundance of bad news, it’s easy enough to forget what political travesty took place two weeks ago, let alone nine years ago.

Yet while these posters and slogans certainly constitute a part of Tillmans’s catalog, giving them their own section came across a bit heavy-handed, as if it were being shoved down our throats. I kept thinking of the insufficiency of words, or at least the inefficacy of these slogans, in galvanizing people. Maybe his protest photos, which neighbored the posters at the Pompidou, could be more effective if plastered on city walls. The sloganeering political campaigns left little room for nuance, for example, in wanting to remain in the peacekeeping project of the EU while being simultaneously outraged by “Fortress Europe’s” callous indifference to the lives of migrants, or deals such as the 2023 Memorandum of Understanding, a partnership between the European Union and Tunisia that offered more economic opportunities to the North African country in order to prevent migration to Europe. Perhaps Tillmans believes there isn’t room for this discourse when far-right movements are flourishing. But the strengths of his political work lie not in his slogans and posters but in his photographic documentation of coming together and protesting.

In an interview with Centre Pompidou ahead of the survey Tillmans remarked, “I’m grateful to still be interested in the world. To wake up in the morning and look at things with joy and curiosity. To still be drawn to portraiture, to people.” This sentiment is not far from the kinds of solidarity that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call for in their recent essay “The Rise of End Times Fascism”: “Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political […] A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.” In a follow-up interview, discussing what’s needed to take on the Far Right, Klein stated, “I’ve never encountered a potential coalition more broad than the idea of: How about if we believe in this world?”

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Featured image: Wolfgang Tillmans, Exhibition view at Centre Pompidou, 2025. © Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Germany; Chantal Crousel, Paris; Maureen Paley, London; and David Zwirner, New York. Image has been cropped.