German artist Wolfgang Tillmans divides his time between Berlin and London. He staged his first solo exhibition in 1988, at the age of just 20. In 1990 some of his pictures of Hamburg's gay night-life were published in the UK magazine i-D. He felt drawn by the idea of portraying modern life, youth culture and clubbing, but later extended his subject matter to include everyday life: 'My starting point is to take contemporary images, to make art that makes you feel what it is to be alive today'. His work has been linked with that of 19th century painter Gustave Courbet in its voracious quest for realism, and with pop-art figures such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke. He does not see his output as part of the history of photography but as part of the general history of art. His video art, which he began to show in the past decade, is linked to Warhol's film-making: a fixed camera with live sound recording life with no filters or post-production, reflecting the absurdity and boredom of the everyday. In recent years he has begun to focus on digital photography, though he refuses to manipulate his images.

In 2000, he began to show abstract photos together with his well-known landscapes, still-lifes, portraits and everyday scenes, which he hung after the fashion of a patchwork, often unmounted, directly on the wall, together with photocopies and magazine clippings. His exhibitions are closely paralleled by his publications, which must be seen as artist's books. His abstract images are the result of random chance: he uses photographic paper (sometimes unexposed, sometimes exposed to different coloured light sources) which he allows to be contaminated in the processing machinery by water and chemicals, especially silver nitrate. This results in scratches and marks that change both the colour and the physical surface of the paper. He sees this as 'pure' photography, recording light essentially as the basis for the visual potential of the medium. Tillmans tests the limits between the abstract and the figurative, between highbrow and lowbrow culture.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1998), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2002), the MoMA PS1 (New York, 2006), the Serpentine Gallery (London, 2010), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2012), the Metropolitan Museum (New York, 2015) and the Serralves Museum (Porto, Portugal, 2016), among other venues. He won the Hasselblad Award in 2015 and the Turner Prize in 2000 (in the latter case being the first foreign artist and the first photographer to receive the award).

Isabel Tejeda