Freedom From The Known is Wolfgang Tillmans' first exhibition for an American museum, and unlike any he has ever previously mounted. The exhibition focuses on the artist's purely abstract photographs, and explores the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work.

Tillmans' large-scale abstractions are presented in frames—a departure for an artist who pioneered a style of installation based on taping and pinning pictures directly to the wall. The elusive, transitory images in the abstractions, when framed, can be seen as objects in space, displaying both buoyancy and weight. Most of these works are camera-less pictures made by the direct manipulation of light on paper, rather than on a negative.