Maureen Paley is pleased to present Build From Here, Wolfgang Tillmans’s eleventh exhibition with the gallery.

This exhibition marks the inauguration of our new gallery in 4 Herald St. This space previously served as part of Tillmans’s former London studio and therefore has particular significance, both for the gallery and the artist. He moved his primary production to Berlin in 2011. Build From Here extends across all our three East London spaces: 4 Herald St, 60 Three Colts Lane, and Studio M. The exhibition will present new photographic works made with and without the camera, new photocopy works, as well as two recent video works which were premiered in Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in summer 2025.

Build From Here seeks to demonstrate the process of making and observation as an act of transformation. A work such as Easter Passion (2007) shows the artist’s former studio. The piece depicts examples of Tillmans’s Silver works hung on the wall; these chromatic surfaces invite the viewer to meditate on their form, colour, and texture, whilst also demonstrating the resources, both surplus and used, that underpin creation. Also shown are a selection of works created at a metalworking factory in Remscheid, Germany – Tillmans’s hometown. Remscheid has a long history of toolmaking, and this body of work documents the people and mechanisms involved in this essential and particular industry which shapes the city.

Travelling Camera (2025), displayed at 60 Three Colts Lane, resembles a drone flight over an urban landscape, yet unfolds as a journey across the hidden infrastructure of a digital screen. As the camera moves over the reverse side of a 4K monitor, the technological components – circuit boards, inverters, and cables – are revealed as a dense, physical terrain. Tillmans then overlays this sleek surface with organic and cultural fragments: sand dollar seashells from Ghana, vintage postage stamps, and rusted metal, linking the polished mechanisms of modern image production with tactile, analogue objects. The film demonstrates how the introduction of a camera transforms the mechanical object into alternative forms and concepts, such as a landscape, a history of media, and a meditation on the interconnectedness of beings.

Build From Here marks the twentieth anniversary of Tillmans’s ongoing work cycle, Truth Study Centre, which was first displayed at Maureen Paley in 2005. With Truth Study Centre, Tillmans introduced a new display architecture for his work, using wooden tables to hold constellations of photocopied media, texts, ephemera, and photographs. These arrangements comment on the processes of making both within and outside the studio, as scientific studies, web pages, forgeries, and newspapers mingle with Tillmans’s pictures.A small installation of two recent tables in this exhibition is an acknowledgment of their history which began in this space.

Since the earliest stage of his practice, Tillmans has worked with the photocopier, favouring its accessibility and the texture of the prints it produces. Build From Here includes new examples of photocopy works, and across recent pieces, garments are laid down directly on the copier bed before being enlarged, inverted, and abstracted through the device. In other works, Tillmans holds paper to the screen, tilting, curling, and arranging the sheets to produce shifting patterns of light and surface. “This fascination with paper was really there at the start with the photocopier” Tillmans comments, “this admiration for paper and how magical it is: the transformation, how something so mechanical and industrial can become so charged with meaning and beauty.”

The video work shown in Studio M, Wild Carrot (2025), revolves around the flower of a wild carrot in nature, accompanied by Tillmans’s playing of a kalimba. The work highlights the specific capacities of video, celebrating the medium’s unique potential to describe an object in three dimensions through an act of prolonged observation. In Tillmans’s work, purposeful objects cease to have their intended functionality and are morphed into sculptural objects for contemplation.

A travelling exhibition of work by the artist, To look without fear, was presented across the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2022); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2023); and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2023). In 2017, Tate Modern opened Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, a major survey of Tillmans’s work. Fragile, a touring exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and travelled throughout Africa, with the last venue at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria (2022). Other institutional exhibitions of Tillmans’s work include Wolfgang Tillmans – Sound is Liquid, The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2022); Today Is The First Day, WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, Belgium (2022); Rebuilding the Future, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2018); and Qu'est-ce qui est différent?, Carré d'Art-Musée d'art contemporain, Nîmes, France (2018).