Wolfgang Tillmans @ GoMA

Wolfgang Tillmans last featured with a four-star review of his 2012 Glasgow International show in The Common Guild. There’s a little overlap in Pictures from New World, a pallid presentation of GoMA’s recent acquisitions.

Tillmans himself has been exhibiting internationally for over two decades. He first came to prominence in the late 80s, making a name for his photography of his immediate social circle and documenting Euro club nightlife of the time.

Making a virtue out of genre crossing, his portraiture, still life and landscapes range across subject matter and location. Beyond that, for Pictures from New World, there’s no more of a prescriptive reading or concept to be applied.

So there are images of old pipes, starry skies and car lights. Next to the flowers, abstract horizon, piles of garbage and other pictures of things, there’s an odd orientalism to the inclusion of what can only be described as non-specific ‘foreign people.’

It’s a predictable and unforgivable consequence of the constructed naïvety of the show’s ‘anything goes’ eclecticism. A trashyard, next to a clean, new-looking headlight, the hanging might be going for a conceptual reference to throwaway culture.

Set all in a line, and with the larger paper works fenced off, it’s a standard hang. This is a failure to represent Tillmans’ practice, frequently celebrated for its strikingly unconventional and site-sensitive installations – as we complimented in the 2012 review.

Altogether, Pictures from New World comes across as the clean edit of a practice that caused The Mirror to exclaim in an enraged and misleading headline, ‘Gay Porn Photographer Snaps up Turner Prize.’ Scrubbed up and out, the show make Tillmans’ practice into a bland photojournal, whose trite and vague moralising blunders into offensive exoticising.