The subject of multiple essays, the defining piece of his winning Turner Prize exhibition in 2000 and owned by several major institutions, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde series is one of the artist’s most important works. To Tillmans, Concorde represented an ‘environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything.’ (W. Tillmans, Concorde, Cologne 1997, p.1) Mixing the glamour and excitement of Concorde with its environmental issues, the series looks to focus in on the contradictions between technological utopia and dystopia.
Executed in 1997, the Concorde series has been described by Neville Wakefield as the turning point in the development of Tillmans’ mature style. Photographed from ground level, under the flight path or outside the airport perimeter fence, Tillmans guards the voyeuristic attitude that that threads his work. However, the series marks the artist’s first move away from his earlier youthful images towards the more critical style for which he has since become internationally renowned.