Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner

Interviews with Brice Marden, Peter Schjeldahl, Robert Storr, Madeleine Grynsztejn, and Helen Molesworth by Lynne Tillman. Interview with the artist by David Zwirner

Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice, and are typically painted from pre-existing imagery which includes photographs and video stills, exploring diverse and sensitive topics including the Holocaust, the effects of images from 9/11, the ambiguous utopia of the Disney empire, the colonial history of his native Belgium, and the phenomenon of the corporation. Since 1994, Tuymans has committed himself to showing a new series of works at David Zwirner once every two years—a promise that he kept, and continues to keep, twenty years on, as his tempered style and political content have steadily garnered him worldwide acclaim. 

This reprint edition of Luc Tuymans: Exhibitions at David Zwirner includes additional visual material, as well as an updated appendix that features an exhibition history and bibliography. Striking color reproductions of the artist’s major works are contextualized by brief commentary, photographs, and archival documentation, as well as installation views, exhibition checklists, and personal photographs. Other texts include an interview between the artist and David Zwirner, as well as individual interviews conducted by Lynne Tillman with art critic Peter Schjeldahl; artist Brice Marden; art historian and academic Robert Storr; and together with Helen Molesworth and Madeleine Grynsztejn, co-curators of Tuymans’s major US retrospective.

$55.00

Publisher: David Zwirner / Ludion

Artists: Luc Tuymans

Contributors: Madeleine Grynsztejn, Brice Marden, Helen Molesworth, Peter Schjeldahl, Tommy Simoens, Robert Storr, Lynne Tillman

Designer: Tony Waddingham

Printer: Deckers Snoeck, Antwerp

Publication Date: 2013

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 9 3/4 x 11 1/2 in (24.8 x 29.2 cm)

Pages: 224

Reproductions: 220 color

ISBN: 9789461300720

Retail: $55 US & Canada | £30 | €42

Status: 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.

All Luc Tuymans books

Madeleine Grynsztejn

Madeleine Grynsztejn is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was formerly a curator at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.?<

Brice Marden

Brice Marden is an American artist based in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Brice Marden: Plane Image, A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, which was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and which later traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Helen Molesworth

Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles–based writer, podcaster, and curator. Her major museum exhibitions include: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, and Work Ethic. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Peter Schjeldahl

Formerly art critic for the Village Voice and contributing editor for Art in America, Peter Schjeldahl has worked as the critic-in-residence for The New Yorker since 1998.

Robert Storr

Robert Storr is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art. He was formerly Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2002, he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 2005 to 2007, he was Director of Visual Art for the Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.

Lynne Tillman

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a professor and writer in residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.