In 1994, the young German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans was visiting the ICA in London with his parents when he was struck by the power of art. “I took them to the Charles Ray exhibition, and there was a sculpture of a father, mother and baby girl all scaled to the same height, making these babies super-scary giants. My mother was so upset by it, I guess because it shook her sense of the order of things. I’ll never forget it.”
Almost 28 years on, Tillmans is a celebrated artist himself – his retrospective exhibition To Look Without Fear currently occupies an entire floor at MoMA in New York – and since 2019 he has been the chair of the ICA’s board. While its remit is still to be at the parent-upsetting cutting edge of art, the institution, which is situated a short walk from Buckingham Palace, is short of funds and struggling to reassert its identity after the pandemic, which as well as forcing its temporary closure vastly reduced the numbers of people coming into the West End.
