Luc Tuymans

Since the end of the 1980s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has been developing an extraordinarily complex work, combining the question of representation and representability--inherent in any kind of painting--with a radical charge of pictorial motives. Grounded in a structure that is coolly figurative and drawinglike, and materials that are always preprocessed and mediated (for example, Polaroid shots, newspaper clippings, film stills), Tuymans creates calm, small-format pictures of cropped landscapes, objects, architecture, and seemingly masked people. In their pastel haziness, often primed with white, his pictures evade concrete designation. This book presents a representative selection of Tuymans's works as well as a large group of specially created new works delimited by two central picture motifs: the cycle Die Zeit references the Holocaust, whereas Passion concerns the essence of religious belief.