The Turner Prize-winning German artist Wolfgang Tillmans is selling posters of his artwork for £50 in order to support night clubs, music venues and arts spaces that are at risk of going out of business because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Tillmans, who has enlisted 40 other international artists including Mark Leckey, Betty Tompkins and Andreas Gursky, launched the 2020 Solidarity fundraising campaign with the aim of giving a financial boost to any artistic enterprise “where a lack of audience is causing an existential threat”. “There are many places that may not get help or bailed out because they are informal places, in culture, nightlife and music. I feel an urgency to do something so they don’t have to close down permanently,” he said. Billed as being “an unlimited edition, only available for a limited period of time” the £50 (US $50 , €50) price mark was chosen as a way of making the art affordable. “It’s a price that is a serious donation and is a similar amount of money that you might have spent at one of these spaces on a night out,” he said. Posters available to buy include Marlene Dumas’s portrait of James Baldwin, which supports the Siegessäule magazine in Berlin, Gillian Wearing’s All I Ever Wanted Was Love print, helping the nightclub Renate, while proceeds from sales of Mark Leckey’s print titled A Changeling Can Change will go towards the multi-purpose arts space ACUD MACHT NEU, also in Berlin. Tillmans is in discussion with other venues, including The Cause nightclub and events space in Totttenham, London, which are under financial pressure and hopes the project will grow to include venues around the world that “join together in one crowdfunding action and this way pool their reach”. Tillmans confirmed the project was open to commercial businesses, such as bars and clubs, because they are “places of social life are also places of cultural life” and it would be “terrible if we lost half the places that we loved going to”. The artist is paying for the printing and shipping of the posters to the venues so that 100% of the proceeds can be used by the beneficiary, with venues in Poland, the US and the UK all potentially joining the campaign, which has no end date. Tillmans’s own contribution to the project is a picture of a still life setting from his studio which was the last image printed in the space before it was forced to close because of the Covid-19 containment measures. “Lots of people want to do something but they don’t know how or where and it’s really just an action where I connect artists who I either know or feel comfortable approaching to just give one design each,” he said. During the EU referendum debate, Tillmans designed a series of 25 posters backing the remain campaign triggered by his “concerns isolationism and the rise of rightwing extremism in Europe and beyond”. With slogans including “No man is an island, no country by itself” and “What is lost is lost forever”, the posters were available to download and share via his website with Jonathan Jones saying they captured “what I suspect is the hidden emotional truth for millions of people”.