The photocopier is arguably the least exciting piece of office furniture. Chairs are ergonomic, keyboards have their warriors and even the watercooler has its moments.

There’s nothing quite as mundane as the copy machine, which only replicates.

This is not, however, how the German artist Mr Wolfgang Tillmans sees it. For him, the photocopier has been a tool of thrilling possibility ever since, at 16, he discovered its potential for enlarging and shading existing images, effectively serving as a camera.

Mr Tillmans has used many other media, including the lens, in a career portfolio that spans club reportage, still life and abstract works. Now the Turner Prize winner returns to the photocopier and other camera-free methods for his latest exhibition at the Maureen Paley gallery. The show, Mr Tillmans’ ninth at the gallery in east London, focuses on his multi-faceted approach to image making from the mid-1980s to the present day.

The photocopy series is deliberately prosaic. There are black and white copies, and inkjet prints of enlarged photocopies.

In the ground-floor gallery, Mr Tillmans returns to his Greifbar works, which play with light, in a darkroom. New pieces are created without negatives or a camera, purely by manipulating light on paper, as in “Greifbar 77” (2018). It is a direct engagement by the artist with the physical realities, who, under these self-imposed conditions, asks the question: “Is a picture possible?”

It’s a question Mr Tillmans, who will be the subject of a major retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2021, has answered time and time again in his unconventional fashion, intent on the potential for seeing things differently in a world where images are everywhere, and much copied.

You might never look at your office copier in the same way again.