Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans Has Enlisted His Art-Star Friends to Make $50 Posters to Benefit Shuttered Nightclubs and Art Spaces

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has brought together
40 international artists, including Thomas Ruff and Elizabeth
Peyton, to sell posters to benefit art spaces, nightclubs, music
venues, and bars at risk of shuttering because of the lockdown.

“There are many places that may not get help or bailed out
because they are informal places, in culture, nightlife, and music.
I feel an urgency to do something so they don’t have to close down
permanently,” Tillmans told the Guardian. He’s
priced the works at $50 each because it is “a similar amount of
money that you might have spent at one of these spaces on a night
out.”

The fundraising campaign, hosted by Tillmans’s nonprofit
exhibition space Between Bridges in
Berlin, is called Solidarity 2020. So far, the campaign, which is
issuing posters in “an unlimited edition, only available for a
limited period of time,” according to the project website, has
attracted interest from venues in the US, the UK, Germany, and
Poland.

Tillmans’s own poster design is a photograph of a still life
arrangement in his studio. He chose it because it was the last
image he printed before he shut down operations.

The artist is paying for the printing and shipping of all the
posters to the venues. The struggling businesses will then sell the
posters directly to their supporters, so that they can receive
100 percent of the proceeds. The website directs interested parties
to individual business websites to make their purchases.

Some artists have created new work for the series, like Nicole
Eisenman’s Never Forget Kissing in Bars. Others
tapped their archives for thematically appropriate images, like
Gillian Wearing’s All I Ever Wanted Was Love, a
1992-93 photograph of a young man holding up a handwritten sign
bearing the work’s title, his mouth and nose covered in a
bandana.

Other participating artists include Christopher Wool, Jacolby
Satterwhite, Betty Tompkins, and Marlene Dumas, with more expected
to come.

The post Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans Has Enlisted His
Art-Star Friends to Make $50 Posters to Benefit Shuttered
Nightclubs and Art Spaces appeared first on artnet
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