Marking the inauguration of Maureen Paley’s new gallery at 4 Herald St, Build From Here by Wolfgang Tillmans showed in a space that had once formed part of Tillmans’s former London studio and therefore held particular significance for both the gallery and the artist. Tillmans moved his primary production to Berlin in 2011, yet this exhibition extended across all three East London spaces; 4 Herald St, 60 Three Colts Lane, and Studio M. Presenting new photographic works made with and without the camera, new photocopy pieces, and two recent video works that had premiered at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in summer 2025, as part of Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us.

The exhibition explored the act of making and observation as a transformative process. Works such as Easter Passion (2007) revealed the artist’s former studio, depicting his Silver works on the wall. These chromatic surfaces invited contemplation of form, colour, and texture, while also demonstrating the resources — both surplus and used — that underpinned creation. Other works documented Tillmans’s engagement with Remscheid, Germany, his hometown and a city shaped by centuries of toolmaking, capturing both the people and mechanisms of this essential industry.

At the same time, Build From Here celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Tillmans’s ongoing work cycle, Truth Study Centre, first shown at Maureen Paley in 2005. This series had introduced a novel display architecture: wooden tables arranged with constellations of photocopied media, texts, ephemera, and photographs, where scientific studies, web pages, forgeries, and newspapers mingled with Tillmans’s images, commenting on the processes of making both within and beyond the studio. A small installation of two recent tables in this exhibition acknowledged the history of this work, which began in this very space.