Paris’ most popular contemporary and modern museum is closing for 5 years due to a major renovation. For their latest exhibition, the Centre Pompidou gave German artist Wolfgang Tillmans total freedom to create a unique project to mark the end of the exhibition programme at the centre in Paris. Until September 22, he took over the 6,000 m2 of level 2 in the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (Bpi) and transformed the space by means of a curatorial experiment. This installation creates a dialogue between his work and the library space, questioning it both as an architectural structure and as a place for the dissemination of knowledge.

© Wolfgang Tillmans

Titled “Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us”, this retrospective exhibition explores over thirty-five years of artistic practice across various photographic genres, including portraiture, still life, architecture, documentary images, and abstraction. His work is displayed in a wide variety of ways, playing on the verticality of the walls and the horizontality of the tables in a manner that defies any attempt at categorisation. In addition to his photographic work, Tillmans has incorporated moving images, music, sound, and words into this extensive installation, together with contributions from performance artists.

© Wolfgang Tillmans

In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been the subject of major retrospectives in leading institutions, notably at the Tate Modern in London in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He has also presented a major exhibition entitled ‘Fragile’ which toured the African continent (2018–2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoundé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is his first solo exhibition at an institution in Paris since his ambitious installation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2002. The exhibition is complemented by a catalogue and the publication of an expanded version of Tillmans’ Reader, which has been translated into French. This book is a collection of writings by and interviews with the artist.

© Wolfgang Tillmans

As a main partner of the exhibition, the house of Celine is collaborating for the first time ever with the Centre Pompidou on the “Accès libre par Celine” initiative: offering select days of free admission to the public. This unique initiative was imagined as an open invitation to all, an opportunity to discover the world of Wolf[1]gang Tillmans and the Centre Pompidou ahead of its imminent closure.

© Wolfgang Tillmans

You can grab your free tickets HERE.

Wolfgang Tillmans
Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us
13 Jun – 22 Sep 2025 – Centre Pompidou, Paris