Luc Tuymans

<p>Luc Tuymans (born 1958) is one of today’s most widely admired painters, a continuation of the great tradition of Northern European painting and an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. First published in hardback for the artist’s first full-scale American survey in 2009, and now available in paperback, this is without question the authoritative publication on Tuymans. It features approximately 75 key works from 1978 to the present, and is accompanied by essays analyzing the painter’s main concerns, with particular attention paid to his working process and his adaptation of source materials. Helen Molesworth examines themes of sinister banality, Joseph Leo Koerner writes on iconophobia and iconophilia, Ralph Rugoff considers Tuymans’ recent work and Bill Horrigan examines the artist’s cinematic sources. This book remains not only the most comprehensive survey of Tuymans’ career to date, but also the most thorough chronology of his development.</p>

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Wexner Center for the Arts

This exhibition will include 10 new paintings, in which Tuymans puts forth the image of a fragile America and the crumbling state of current affairs. There is a sense of delayed trauma, depicted in flat, muted hues, that shuns the obvious and circumvents easy interpretation. With a similar intensity to the exhibitions Mwana Kitoko, 2000, in which he examined the colonial history of Belgium, and Fortune, 2003, which centered on the effects of images from 9/11, Tuymans offers a critique of America that is intended to be subconsciously constructed. While there is nothing overt or merely symbolic about these paintings, they lay claim to real events, suppressed memories, and, in this case, the reality of our current political dilemma. Incited by war-time musical films from the 1940s, the central concept of the exhibition is a state of confusion derived from inconclusive memories and the dissolution of the familiar. In musicals, the subsequent chaos that is created by dancing (even when carefully choreographed) creates constant, yet dislocated, visual confrontation. For Tuymans, each painting in the exhibition presents a fragmented glimpse of a disjointed whole; his aim is to make the audience consider each image, the opposite of each image, and the uncertainty that follows. The exhibition s title, Proper, is in itself an aberration. While it refers to a seemingly requisite order determined by society at large, it simultaneously suggests the opposite improper and therefore subverts the notion of correctness as it relates to social and societal expectations. In these paintings, things as they should be are indefinite, memories are questionable, and perception is clouded by a juxtaposition of narrative and ambiguity. In a key painting, we are confronted by the cropped, larger-than-life-sized face of Condoleeza Rice. Prompted by a remark made by a Belgian official, in which Rice was described as strong; not unpretty, Tuymans portrait of Rice forces us to reevalua

Luc Tuymans: Proper

Gerrit Vermeiren

David Zwirner

Regarding Warhol Sixty Artists, Fifty Years

Alex Katz

Rebecca Lowery

Robert Gober

Hans Haacke

Alfredo Jaar

Marla Prather

Chuck Close

ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM

Jeff Koons

Metropolitan Museum Of Art (new York, N.y.)

Vija Celmins

John Baldessari

Julian Schnabel

Ian Alteveer

Polly Apfelbaum

Mark Lawrence Rosenthal

Deborah Kass

Ryan Trecartin

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Luc Tuymans: Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man)

Exhibitions International

Against the Day

WIELS

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Books by Luc Tuymans