Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans is a Belgian visual artist best known for his paintings which explore people's relationship with history and confront their 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. The blurred effect is, however, created purposefully with painted strokes, it is not the result of a 'wiping away' technique.
Formal and conceptual oppositions recur in his work, which is echoed in his remark that while 'sickness should appear in the way the painting is made' there is also pleasure in its making – a 'caressing' of the canvas. This reflects Tuymans' semantic shaping of the philosophical content of his work. Often allegorical, his titles add a further layer of imagery to his work – a layer that exists beyond the visible. The painting Gaskamer exemplifies his use of titles to provoke associations in the mind of the viewer. Meaning, in his work, is never fixed; his paintings incite thought. A related characteristic of Tuymans' work is the way he often works in series, a method which enables one image to generate another through which images can be formulated and reformulated ad infinitum. Images are repeatedly analysed and distilled, and a large number of drawings, photocopies and watercolours are produced in preparation for his oil paintings. Each final painting is, however, completed in a single day.
Early life
Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel close to the city of Antwerp on 14 June 1958. His father was Belgian Flemish and his mother was Dutch. During World War II his mother's family joined the Dutch Resistance and hid refugees, whereas some members of his father's family allegedly had sympathised with Nazi ideology. This fact echoed through family conversations, raising moral questions and feelings of guilt, and the subject became a source of fascination and fear, later playing a key role in Tuymans' painting.His interest in art manifested itself at a young age, and his ability was first recognised during a summer holiday in Zundert, when he won a drawing competition. He later said this event gave him a sense of the path he had to take. When he was eight or nine, his uncle took him to the Kunstmuseum in The Hague where he saw a painting by Mondrian. In a much later conversation, he explained how 'looking at that abstract painting was my first art experience.... I felt the magic of art in it.... I did understand the monumentality of that work.'
Education
Tuymans' formal art studies began at the age of 18 at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels. During this period he traveled to Budapest where he saw El Greco's paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts. In an interview in 2020, Tuymans described seeing these paintings as a shock, and discussed the fascination El Greco still holds for him today. He continued his studies at the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre in Brussels, before going to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he gave up painting for filmmaking. Having completed his fine art studies, Tuymans enrolled for an academic degree in Art history at the Free University of Brussels.Work (paintings)
Early work, 1972–94
During the crucial first phase of Tuymans' artistic development, his painting method evolved rapidly, and his first solo and group exhibitions took place. According to the catalogue raisonné, he created nearly 200 paintings on canvas or hardboard during this period. His first known painting dates from 1972 and the first public exhibited painting was created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait. He was a student at the time, and submitted it to the national painting competition in Belgium, which he won.From 1979 to 1980, Tuymans worked in collaboration with Marc Schepers on two local projects entitled Morguen. The artists asked families from a neighbourhood in Antwerp for historical family photographs, a collection they built on with their own documentation of the area. The following year, they published the project in the Tijdschrift voor levende Volkskunst, as a journal modelled on the historical Volksfoto magazine. Six months later they organized a second photo project. This time, they focused on the workers' district surrounding St. Andrew's Church, Antwerp.
Between 1980 and 1985, Tuymans stopped painting, dedicating himself to experimentation with film. Among other film-projects, he created Feu d’artifice and made plans for an unrealized, semi-documentary feature film. Some of the film fragments he made later served as inspiration for paintings. When Tuymans resumed painting in 1985, he changed his technique, and since then he never spent more than a day working on a painting.
From 1978 on, Tuymans' paintings centred on European memories of World War II, confronting Adorno's famous question whether art was impossible following the holocaust, and 'the collapse of any coherent tradition in painting' described by Peter Schjeldahl. One of his works from this period is a small painting of the gas chamber in Dachau, entitled Gaskamer, 1986. This painting was based on a watercolour he had done on site. As J.S. Marcus from The Wall Street Journal wrote, the painting 'simplified the means of painting.... flattened the perspective, muted the colour and the direction of the composition.... To save the painting he almost makes it disappear.' Other paintings that date from this period are the 1988 four-part painting Die Zeit in which Tuymans combines a portrait of the Nazi frontman Reinhard Heydrich with two spinach tablets and a cityscape, and the 1989 painting Die Wiedergutmachung that depicts the eyes of gypsy children who had been experimented on by the Nazis.
From the late 1970s, Tuymans also began to paint portraits of himself and imaginary portraits, anonymous individuals, and historical and public figures. Superficially, most of these images seem to be traditional portraits; the approach is dispassionate and not psychological. His portraits strip individuality away, leaving the body resembling a shell, the face a mask. Another example of his figurative portrait work is Der diagnostische Blick, a series of ten paintings from 1992 based on clinical images of bodies and body parts he found in a physician's manual on physical diseases.
As Meyer-Hermann wrote in the catalogue raisonné, the artist first elucidated his theoretical approach in an unrealized proposal for a group exhibition, entitled Virus of the Vanities. Here, he defines key terms and develops a dialectic between the 'virus' as representative of the 'cult', and 'vanity' as a projection of 'culture', also opposing the 'anecdotal' to the 'symbolic'. Tuymans refers to nine of his paintings dating from 1978 to 1990 to support his ideas.
Tuymans' first exhibition in North America, entitled Superstition, was held in 1994 at the David Zwirner Gallery. The exhibition reflected humankind's scepticism and spiritual indifference as manifested by our attitude to recent historical events.
1995–2006
Since 1995 Tuymans' international renown grew, and he participated in over 140 group exhibitions and had 47 solo shows in Europe, North America, and Asia. Between these dates, he created 198 works he classified as paintings, several murals and textile wall hangings.His exhibition Heimat, held in 1995 at the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes, was a response to political events in Flanders and targeted Flemish nationalism. Pieces shown were all dated from that year and included The Flag, A Flemish Village, the Flemish memorial Ijzertoren, a portrait of the Flemish writer Ernest Claes entitled A Flemish Intellectual, and Home Sweet Home. Several of the paintings included in Heimat were shown the following year in the exhibition Face à l‘histoire held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which looked at modern artists' responses to major historical and political events over the preceding sixty years. In a later 2014 interview discussing the Heimat series with De Witte Raaf he expressed his particular dislike of the separatist, far-right Flemish political party the Vlaams Blok, which achieved its best electoral result to date in Antwerp in 1994, stating: 'I was ashamed that I was from Antwerp!’
In 1996, Tuymans' exhibition Heritage, held at the David Zwirner Gallery, consisted of ten new paintings of the same title, all inspired by the mood that prevailed in the U.S. following the Oklahoma City bombing. The series depicts normal, almost stereotypical American imagery: a painting of two baseball caps ; Mount Rushmore ; a man working ; a portrait and a birthday cake. The series also includes a portrait of the wealthy Ku Klux Klan member Joseph Milteer.
In 2000, Tuymans attracted attention with his series of political paintings Mwana Kitoko, inspired by King Baudouin of Belgium's state visit to the Congo in the 1950s. These works were exhibited in 2000 at the David Zwirner Gallery and the following year in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
At Documenta 11 in 2002, which focused on works of art containing political or social commentary, many expected Tuymans to present new work created in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York. Instead, he presented a simple still-life executed on a massive scale, deliberately ignoring all reference to world events. This inevitably led to some negative criticism. Tuymans however, described his decision as a deliberate strategy of 'sublimation': 'In Still-Life the idea of banality becomes larger than life, it is taken to an impossible extreme. It's actually just an icon, an almost purely cerebral painting, more like a light projection. The attacks September 11 attacks| were also an assault on aesthetics. That gave me the idea of reacting with a sort of anti-picture, with an idyll, albeit an inherently twisted one.'
In 2004 Tate Modern in London and in 2006 Museu Serralves in Porto devoted major solo exhibitions to Tuymans work.