Wolfgang Tillmans is a convener of intimacy. His static images—from the sweaty, tangled bodies in his photographs of 1990s gay clubs to more recent portraits of friends and lovers in Berlin, London, and Fire Island—invite us to think dynamically about ways to be together. Even his abstract, cameraless photographs involve the sensuous intermingling of chemicals on paper.
This quality was especially poignant for Roxana Marcoci when production on , the career survey exhibition she has curated for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. introducing “On My Own,” a symphonic electro-pop track recorded by Tillmans in 2018. The artist sings a refrain over the sound of rushing New York subway trains, which at the time of lockdown were largely empty: “I’m on my own and not alone.”
