The Artist Who Wants to Make the E.U. Sexy—And Defeat Brexit

Last Wednesday afternoon, four thousand miles away, Wolfgang Tillmans slouched at his desk. The photographer had Skyped me from the apartment above his Berlin studio, to discuss the poster campaign he’d released that day against “Brexit,” the British referendum on quitting the European Union, slated for June 23rd. This project may seem oddly activist for a German artist who became known, in the nineties, for his snapshots of London gays and clubbers; who, when he won the Turner Prize, in 2000, was praised for his attention to the “unregarded aspects of the everyday” in photos of armpits and sky. Tillmans, who is forty-seven, has his hair cropped close to his rugged head; he wore a purple Nike T-shirt, and there was other evidence of youthful chic around him—a fuchsia sock on the back of a bentwood chair, two blocky prints on the far wall. But all was of a piece: if the E.U. is to survive, Tillmans said, it must become fashionable.