LUC TUYMANS - THE ARENA

LUC TUYMANS (1958-)

Since his appearance at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and at Documenta11, Luc Tuymans has become one of the most important painters of his generation. Since the end of the eighties, the Belgian artist has been developing an extraordinarily complex work, combining the question of representation and representability - inherent in any kind of painting - with a radical charging of pictorial motives. On the basis of a structure that is coolly figurative and drawing-like, and always relying on material that was pre-processed medially (Polaroid shots, newspaper clippings, film stills), he creates calm, small- format pictures of cropped landscapes, objects, architecture, and, frequently, also mask-like people. In their pastel haziness, often primed with white, these picture evade concrete designation.
This book presents a representative selection of Tuymans´ works as well as a large set of specially created new works delimited by two central picture groups: on the one hand the cycle Die Zeit (Time) (1988) about the holocaust, on the other the series Passion (1999) about the essence of religious belief.

Edited by Stephan Berg, texts by Stephan Berg, Konrad Bitterli, Philippe Pirotte