Spanning some thirty years, Luc Tuymans’ exhibition, “Intolerance,” speaks to certain abiding preoccupations the Belgian painter has long mined in counterpoint with a rapidly changing world. Well aware from the outset of his career that painting as an art-form was widely considered in crisis and that the role and ubiquity of the image in contemporary culture was radically shifting as a consequence of proliferating technological developments, Tuymans adopted a contestatory position.
In a contrarian move, painting became for him a vehicle through which the most urgent and volatile issues, whether relating to history, identity, nationalism and belief, or to head-line social and political events could be eloquently probed. Organized around key thematics in Tuymans’ stringent practice, this ambitious retrospective will cast new light on his singular trajectory.
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans’s metaphorical and figurative paintings, with their muted palette of grays and browns, transform television, film, and print sources into examinations of history and memory. Beneath the artist’s restraint and gentle, often exquisite, painterly language are themes ranging from the Holocaust to corporations’ ill-gotten power to Walt Disney’s vision of the future. Still Life (2002), Tuymans’s response to 9/11, is a large-scale painting of the most quotidian of objects, fruit and a glass pitcher, a comment on the impossibility of capturing the unspeakable. – Artsy.net
Product Details
Hardcover: 464 pages
ISBN-10: 9491819356
Dimensions: 24.89 x 5.08 x 30.23 cm
Publisher: Ludion; Pck Har/Ps edition (2 Nov. 2015)
Language: English
