Edition Detail

In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been particularly interested in the relationship between touch and vision, and the body and the gaze. He has addressed these themes in his work on the materiality of paper and its perception, in which he has explored different forms of presentation, framing, and depiction, and also by looking at print colours and processes or the surfaces and folds of textiles.

For Around Ten Years Around Me (2022), Wolfgang Tillmans laid the tattered waistband of a jacket that he had worn nearly every day for the past ten years, directly onto a colour photocopier, and made 159 individual copies of it. The image of this jacket with its folds and different textile parts develops a strong physical presence, while also pointing to the body that was inside it for so long. At the same time, this way of reproducing it also confuses and alienates the item of clothing. Around Ten Years Around Me is thus both a witness of subjective physicality and a visual abstraction, an indicator of the body and the attraction of the surface. These carefully framed sheets were made using an old photocopier that Wolfgang Tillmans had bought in 2000 with his Turner Prize money, and which produces colours and pictorial textures that are no longer available today.

Each photocopy is unique. All the copies of this edition differ considerably in coloring, contrast, and brightness, on a  few copies the toner can even be seen to be peeling off the paper. The artist is here deliberately playing with the technical possibilities and irregularities of the photocopying process.