By Leah Ollman, February 10, 2026
By now, the general look and feel of a Wolfgang Tillmans show is familiar, however distinct: photographs occupy the given gallery or museum space like so many tesserae of a shifting mosaic, ever in progress. An undifferentiated mix of old work and new hangs at, above or below eye level, framed or unframed, the prints ranging from palm-size to broadly panoramic. Some capture life moments (gestures, plays of light, friends, events, views from airplanes) and some are lush, serendipitous performances of photo chemistry, sans representational imagery. Sculptural elements of different sorts are mingled among the prints. "Keep Movin'" at Regen Projects through March 1, holds to this once-bracing, now-formulaic fluidity. An equally apt title for the show might be "Keep Movin' Things Around."
More than 70 photographs, video projections, sculptures and installations spread across the gallery's walls and floors, making for an experience that is physically immersive, even if not psychically compelling. The idiosyncratic spacing and staging command more sustained attention than most of the individual pieces, which says much about Tillmans's understated aesthetic, his oft-described "democratic" approach that he calls his "unprivileged gaze." A Tillmans show registers, to a sorry extent, much the way the universe of images beyond the gallery walls registers—as a flow, a current that washes over us, which saturates more than sates.
The show's temporal span stretches to the utmost extremes of Tillmans's working life. The earliest piece, a large photocopy of a face, repeated in warping ripples, dates from 1988, when Tillmans was just 20. The most recent, a news article reprint, refers to the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis last month. A variety of such articles on current issues, along with screenshots, brochures, and other texts and images appear under clear acrylic on the surfaces of ten slim-legged tables, each titled "Truth Study Center." Tillmans has been using this format for presenting an ongoing personal and cultural archive for roughly 20 years, changing it up from show to show. The clips assembled on one table here focus on the perils of AI; another table's unattributed texts present examples of the vexing relativity of time. Yet another "Truth Study Center" table is topped with mirrors and dusted with sand.
However generously scaled and overdetermined the show's manner of display, Tillmans's works, regarded individually, tend toward the bland, and underwhelming: plainspoken portraits; unremarkable landscapes; pedestrian still-lifes. As in the relentless visual flow of the everyday, though, glimmers do occur. Occasional shots, such as 2014's "Morgenblick," seep with tenderness. The image portrays a shirtless man seen from behind as he gazes out a window at a golden-leafed tree, his twisting torso an intimate, vigorous counterpoint to fall's chill and decay on the other side of the glass. Several abstract pieces are also arresting, most notably "Neighbours 5" (2024), which reads as both trace and drawing, a luminous descendent of Francis Brugière's cut paper photographs of a century ago.
In one of the videos on view, the camera circles slowly around a single blooming stalk of wild carrot, like a reverential pointing finger. In the other, the camera, stopping and starting at irregular intervals, dully skims a surface lined with circuit boards, seashells and old postage stamps from different nations. On the floor throughout the gallery, Tillmans has set tangles of thick blue industrial ropes and smaller loops of metal cable. The found objects add texture to the whole, but their presence feels gratuitous, an unflattering rhyme to a photograph in the show of a lagoon aswirl with flotsam.
In 2003, Tillmans had a midcareer retrospective at the Tate in London with a title declarative of a solid aesthetic and ethical stance: "if one thing matters, everything matters." Nothing is, by definition unworthy of attention, but Tillmans's modes of bestowing attention themselves can feel banal, pretentious, or at worst, both. At best, the fussy scatter of disparate work, its expression of simultaneity and multiplicity, resonates as an apt analogy to the non-linear, selective workings of memory. At best, Tillmans' shows, this one included, serve in their entirety as one big Truth Study Center, opportunities to calibrate one's own sensibility, to consider what each component brings to the table, what the aggregation suggests, how and whether it all matters.
Leah Ollman has written about the visual arts for The Los Angeles Times, Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail, among many others. She edited the anthology, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, published by Saint Lucy Books in 2025.
WOLFGANG TILLMANS "Neighbors 5", 2024. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
WOLFGANG TILLMANS "Robin Fischer, Dirostahl, Remscheid", 2024. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
WOLFGANG TILLMANS "The Glove That Fits", 2024. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
WOLFGANG TILLMANS "Turnhose" 2025. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans “Keep Movin’”at Regen Projects, Los Angeles January 15–March 1, 2026. Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.