Maureen Paley is pleased to host Air de Paris at Studio M for Condo 2025, presenting an exhibition of works by Pati Hill and Wolfgang Tillmans. Both artists have explored the photocopier’s capacity for duplication and abstraction and how the device can be both the subject of an image, and the facilitator of its production. A selection of Pati Hill’s unique xerographs made between 1977 and 1990 are presented alongside a single inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans from 2011.
Pati Hill was a multidisciplinary artist and writer who started to use the photocopier as an artistic tool to publish her first ‘copy works’ in the early 1970s. After the birth of her only child in 1962, Hill claimed to “quit writing in favour of housekeeping” and began a thirteen-year period that she later described on her resume with the words “Housewife, mother.” As she resumed her creative output, she proposed that the copier machine could unite writers and artists owing to its original function of reproducing text. By laying various objects on the scanner such as a pair of scissors, a telephone, or pieces of sliced fruit she aimed to translate invisible domestic labour into a visual language that simultaneously presented objects as images and as scanned still lifes.
“The principles on which the copier works - yes / no, multiplicity, instantaneousness - are those that govern much of modern life, letting the copier impose rather than imposing on it may reveal something about our times and what is in store for us in the near future.”
Pati Hill, Letters to Jill, A Catalogue and Some Notes on Copying, originally published 1979 by Komblee, re-printed by Mousse 2020.
Accompanying this group of Hill’s copy works is a large unframed inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans who has a long-held fascination with the possibility of making new pictures and how the world is presented to us through images. The subject of CLC 800, dismantled, a, is a photocopier seen in the artist’s studio and no longer operational - its external parts laid around the machine’s core. Here, Tillmans uses the camera to analyse and record the complex inner workings of this image-making device. Tillmans had begun making works on a photocopier in 1987 by enlarging found images by up to four hundred percent. These experiments yielded Approaches (1987–88), a group of xerographic triptychs which were displayed at his first solo exhibition, held in 1988 at Café Gnosa, Hamburg. Throughout his career he has continually returned to the photocopier as a means of producing both moving and still images.
“The exploration of the image surface, of the very nature of what constitutes an image, has always been of great fascination to me... I started being interested in photography through deconstructing or destroying photography.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, in Nathan Kernan, What They Are: A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans, Art On Paper, May-Jun 2001.
Pati Hill (b. 1921, Ashland, KY, USA, d. 2014, Sens, France). Selected solo exhibitions include: Printed Matter, New York, USA (2023); Onsen Confidential, Air de Paris, France and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Heaven’s door is open to us / Like a big vacuum cleaner / O help / O clouds of dust / O choir of hairpins, Air de Paris, Paris, France (2020); Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Something Other Than Either, Kunstverein, Munich, Germany (2020); How Something Can Have Been At One Time And In One Place And Nowhere Else Ever Again, Essex Street, New York, USA (2018); Photocopier, Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT, USA (2017); Vers Versailles, Musée Lambinet, Versailles, France (2005).
Selected group exhibitions include: Two Faces Have I, Fidelidade Arte - Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2024); The Hill is Getting Lower. Or It Seems., Sweetwater, Berlin, Germany (2024); L’image et son double, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Nothing is so humble: Prints from Everyday Objects, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, USA (2021); Pictogrammes, Signes de Vie, Émojis: Une Société des Signes, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany (2021); Electroworks, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1985); Electra, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1984). Her work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Whitney Museum, New York, USA; Frac Île-de-France, Paris, France; Arcadia University, Glenside, PA, USA.
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Selected solo exhibitions include: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2025); To Look Without Fear, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2022–24), travelling to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA; Sound is Liquid, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2022); Moon in Earthlight, Maureen Paley: Morena di Luna, Hove (2021); Rebuilding the Future, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2018–19); Qu’est-ce qui est différent?, Carré d'Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France (2018); Fragile, Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias, Kinshasa, DRC (2018), travelling throughout Africa; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013).
Selected group exhibitions include: L’image et son double, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Copy This! Xeros et Copy Art de 1960 à Nos Jours, Le BAL, Paris, France (2021); Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology, 1968–1985, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, USA (2017).His work is included in the collections of Tate, London, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Awards and honours include: TIME100 Most Influential People (2023); Kaiserring Prize, Goslar, Germany (2018); Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, Sweden (2015); Turner Prize, UK (2000).
Pati Hill with Wolfgang Tillmans, CONDO 2025, Studio M hosting Air de Paris press release
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