Aufsicht / View from Above

Aufsicht / View from Above presents the abstract pictures Wolfgang Tillmans made over the four years before 2001, the year after he won the Turner Prize.

The book covers landscapes and cityscapes reworked with unsettling light effects, and the Blushes and Mental Pictures, which he made without negatives by exposing photographic paper to light. Most of the images are photographs and inkjet prints from those years, alongside some more familiar works that look at the abstract qualities of nature and everyday objects. Zdenek Felix edited it, with a text by Giorgio Verzotti and a reprinted interview in which Nathan Kernan speaks with the artist. Hatje Cantz published it in German as Aufsicht, in English and in French. It appeared with the exhibition of the same name, which opened at Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2001 and travelled to the Castello di Rivoli and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2002 and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk in 2003. Tillmans's bibliography notes that he edited and designed all of the colour plates.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid in 1968 and studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. Later books include if one thing matters, everything matters (Tate Publishing, 2003), truth study center (Taschen, 2005) and Lighter (Hatje Cantz, 2008).