Portraits. Luc Tuymans
Essays by Toby Kamps and Robert Storr
Portraits. Luc Tuymans presents 35 paintings from bodies of work ranging over the artist’s entire career. Most seem conventional portraits —Himmler, 1997/98, A Flemish Intellectual, 1995—but others, such as Bloodstains, 1993, and Fingers, 1995, exhibit the artist’s elliptical approach to representation. Tuymans’s canvases are placed in counterpoint to his selections from the Menil Collection: masks, statuary, and paintings from African, ancient Mediterranean, and Native American cultures, as well as European figurative works. The assembly explores such themes as death and memorials, ritual or religion, power, evildoers, and altruism.
Publisher: Yale University Press / The Menil Collection
Artists: Luc Tuymans
Publication Date: 2013
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 1/2 x 11 in (24.1 x 27.9 cm)
Pages: 128
Reproductions: 62 color
ISBN: 9780300196443
Retail: $50 US & Canada | £30 | €37
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.
