Luc Tuymans (Contemporary Artists)

Book Description
Tuymans' monochromatic palette and choice of subject matter - domestic interiors, commonplace objects or family portraits - link painting with post-war filmmaking and amateur photography. The sources of other images on his canvases give his work a brooding violence. Although modest in scale and sensitive in execution, this work is powerful in its haunting evocation of lost lives and repressed histories. In general Tuymans' works are painted in groups for each show and with the venue and the exhibition space in mind. For example, when he represented his country in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennial, Tuymans produced a cycle of works based on the murder of the first post-independence Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Other works in the cycle show images of African sculpture copies from a statue in a Belgian restaurant and images from the Belgian Royal Museum's African collection. These works raised issues about colonialism and post-colonialism, but also came at a time when a parliamentary commission was investigating the links between the Belgian government and royal family's policies and the death of Lumumba


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Luc Tuymans is a Belgian artist who emerged in the late 1980s. Tuymans is one of the world's most prominent figures in contemporary painting although he has also worked in other media. His work fuses the traditions of Old Master Flemish and Spanish genre painting with ideas and images drawn from recent history. Tuymans' monochromatic palette and choice of subject matter - domestic interiors, commonplace objects, the margins of history or family portraits - link painting with filmmaking, photojournalism and amateur photography. The source of his imagery, however, some of which derives from documentation of Nazi atrocities, gives his canvases a brooding violence. Modest in scale and sensitive in execution, this work is powerful in its haunting evocation of lost lives and repressed histories. Tuymans' work has featured in many keys surveys of contemporary painting.


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