Luc Tuymans

Isabel, Diorama, Scramble, Twenty Seventeen

2017

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian visual artist best known for his paintings which explore our relationship with history and confront our seeming ability to ignore it. World War II is a recurring theme in his work. He is a key figure of the generation of European figurative painters who gained renown at a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance due to the new digital age. Much of Tuymans’ work deals with moral complexity, specifically the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. His subjects range from major historical events such as the Holocaust to the seemingly inconsequential or banal: wallpaper, Christmas decorations or everyday objects for example. The artist's sparsely-coloured figurative paintings are made up of quick brush strokes of wet paint. Tuymans paints from photographic or cinematic images drawn from the media or public sphere, as well as from his own photographs and drawings. They often appear intentionally out of focus. Often allegorical, his titles add a further layer of imagery to his work – a layer that exists beyond the visible. Over 100 solo exhibitions of Tuymans’ paintings were staged between 1985 and 2016, including over 70 international solo exhibitions. The first exhibition of Tuymans' paintings, for the Belgian Art Review (1985), took place in Ostend in a deserted swimming pool at the prestigious Thermae Palace. In 2007, Tuymans was appointed Commander of the Order of Leopold of Belgium by King Albert II, in 2013, he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin. In 2019 he received the Medal of Honor from the International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP) in Porto in Portugal.