Artists

Pati Hill, Wolfgang Tillmans

Press release

Maureen Paley is pleased to host Air de Paris at Studio M for Condo 2025, presenting an exhibition of work 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.