Details
Wolfgang Tillmans (B. 1968)
Doing Well
signed, titled, inscribed and dated 'doing well 2001 Unique Wolfgang Tillmans' (on the reverse)
C-print
23⅞ x 20⅛in. (60.5 x 51cm.)
Executed in 2001, this work is unique
Provenance
Galerie Buchholz, Cologne.
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2001).
Anon. sale, Artcurial – Briest - Le Fur - Poulain - F.Tajan Paris, 29 June 2005, lot 649.
Private Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 19 May 2009, lot 144.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
if one thing matters, everything matters Wolfgang Tillmans, exh.cat, London, Tate Britain, 2003 (illustrated in colour, p. 223).
T. Vischer (ed.), Wolfgang Tillmans, Basel 2017 (illustrated in colour p. 208).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.
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Lot Essay

With its crimson ribbons of cascading colour, punctuated by delicate lines, strands and rivulets, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Doing Well, 2001, lyrically transcends the boundaries between photography, painting and drawing. Staining the surface like rippling swathes of ink, the abstract forms unfold in sinuous movements around a central linear formation, veiled by smouldering chromatic fields that shift in and out of focus. This mesmeric and unique work is closely related to the artist’s Freischwimmer, Blushes, Peaches and Starstruck series that collectively encapsulate his dialogue with abstraction. ‘These pictures were essentially made “dry” – only with light and my hands,’ Tillmans has explained. ‘Created in the dark room without negative and without camera, they’re made purely through the manipulation of light on paper. In this respect, their own reality, their creation and their time are absolutely central to their meaning: the time that I spend with the material in which I explore and intensify different effects. This intuitive recording and application of light, while a physical process, is at the same time liberated from a linguistic or painterly gesture of complete control’ (W. Tillmans, quoted at http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2017/march/08/christies-sets-new-record-for-wolfgang-tillmans/ [accessed 23rd February 2018]). In the present work, line, colour and space are rendered inseparable, reduced to ephemeral by-products of Tillmans’ technique. Hints of figurative reality – of smoke, water and fire – lurk in its hazy pools of light. Recently celebrated in a major retrospective at Tate Modern, London, Tillmans questions how photography – stripped of its traditional apparatus – can reveal invisible, alchemical states of being that exist beyond the everyday scope of our vision.

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