The work of Wolfgang Tillmans in Pitti Uomo’s Out of the Blue campaign
News
Edition 98
16.07.2020
The image of the Out of the Blue campaign of Pitti Uomo - curated by Angelo Figus - is Man with clouds from 1998, by one of the most influential contemporary photographers, Wolfgang Tillmans: it portrays a boy flinging himself with a liberating gesture, almost a dance step, towards a blue sky framed by clouds and trees.

Born in Remscheid, in Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans is the photographer that was the symbol of the Nineties: on the pages of ID and of the most alternative magazines he contributed to defining a new esthetic, more intimate, poetic, fragile and disorienting. “Nothing is too personal or too private not to be photographed” is the mantra thanks to which he manages to make the ordinary extraordinary. When the Coronavirus emergency broke out, he launched the 2020Solidarity project to support associations and cultural spaces.
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Out of the Blue
Tillmans' image well represents the new theme of the Pitti Immagine summer shows, Out of the Blue. It underlines the desire to imagine an open and unconstrained season, inclined to exchanges and new contacts: it becomes, after these unimaginable months, a need and the only possible alternative to any theme. Inspired freely by the sky, the sea, the summer night stars, blue tells the symbolic value of a mystical and reconciling color, which predisposes to listening and dialoguing with others. The only one that brings together elegance, informality, and experimentation, capable of unifying all styles.