Luc Tuymans: Birds of a Feather
Texts by Colin Chinnery and Will Self
This book brings together the most recent work by Luc Tuymans. It will be shown in the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in the autumn of 2015. Birds of a Feather shows Tuymans’s fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment and its thinkers, who believed in the ability of humans to shape their future rationally and whose influence extended as far as the United States. Stimulated by a visit to the art collection of the University of Edinburgh, Tuymans did three small portraits of Scottish philosophers, originally painted by the eighteenth-century portrait artist Henry Raeburn. The theme of the Enlightenment is combined with menacing horror: in a monumental dark work, The Shore, which alludes to Goya’s pinturas negras, or in the portrait of the murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa. The British writer Will Self wrote a remarkable short story for The Shore, and the art critic Colin Chinnery has contributed an explanatory essay.
Publisher: Ludion
Artists: Luc Tuymans
Contributors: Colin Chinnery, Will Self
Publication Date: 2015
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 in (21.6 x 26.7 cm)
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9789491819391
Retail: $40 US & Canada | £30
Status: Not Available
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans (b. 1958, Mortsel) is a Belgian artist who is internationally known for his paintings that engage equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter cast in unfamiliar and eerie light. Painted from preexisting imagery, his works often appear slightly out-of-focus and sparsely colored, like third-degree abstractions from reality. Whereas earlier works were based on magazine pictures, drawings, television footage, and Polaroids, recent source images include material accessed online and the artist’s own iPhone photos, printed out and sometimes re-photographed several times. Since the 1980s, Tuymans has steadily exhibited in the United States, Europe, and abroad, and his work is represented in major museum collections.
