View from above

In 2000 Wolfgang Tillmans received the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious contemporary art award. The continual presence of the thirty-three-year-old London resident in exhibitions and the media does not, however, date merely from that year. Tillmans’s new abstract pictures bear witness to the fact that he is much more than simply a chronicler of his own age.

This publication presents the first overview of these works, landscapes and cityscapes that have been reworked by using unsettling light effects. It also includes Tillmans’s Blushes and Mental Pictures, seemingly fragile compositions that he created without negatives, simply by exposing the photographic paper to light. These recent works shed considerable light on Tillmans’s figurative photographs—his images of drapery, the still lifes, the Eclipse and Concorde series—in which the abstract quality of his motifs and compositions had already begun to take centre stage.

Most of the images reproduced in the present volume—in particular the photographs and inkjet prints of the past four years—mark a new phase in the artist’s work, whose latest developments he discusses in a riveting interview.