Luc Tuymans

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity. 'Once Tuymans's muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.' — Jason Farago, The New York Times One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources. This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasps the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: Good Luck, at David Zwirner, Hong Kong; Eternity, at David Zwirner, Paris; and The Barn, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With an introduction by Joshua Cohen, and texts by the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.

This publication appears on the occasion of Luc Tuymans' retrospective exhibition in Hungary. With innumerable analyses by art historians, we thought the most fitting and exciting accompaniment to this display would be a collection of writers' reflections on Tuymans' work. Since one of the things to make this retrospective display special is its being the artist's debut in Central-Europe, Hungary and Poland, we made a point of inviting authors from the region to comment on his art. We gave complete liberty to our authors to decide what to reflect on: a picture, Tuymans' activity as a painter, or some other aspect of his personality.

James Ensor (1860-1949) produced one of the most unusual bodies of work at the turn of the twentieth century. Marked by psychological complexity, contradictions and sheer eccentricity, his works - featuring such bizarre subject-matter as dressed-up skeletons and macabre carnival masks - have continued to baffle and intrigue in equal measure. Ensor was born in Ostend and barely left his home town during his lifetime; his family, however, ran a curio shop filled with an array of exotic objects including parrots, a monkey and masks from around the world, which perhaps in part influenced the imagery of his mature work. In this volume, essays explore Ensor's life and legacy, while Luc Tuymans's comments on his selection provide a dictinctive picture of James Ensor, who has been such a major influence on Expressionism and Surrealism.