Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans (born 14 June 1958) is a Belgian visual artist best known for his paintings which explore people's relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it.

World War II is a recurring theme in his work.

He is a key figure of the generation of European figurative painters who gained renown at a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance due to the new digital age.

Much of Tuymans' work deals with moral complexity, specifically the coexistence of 'good' and 'evil'.

His subjects range from major historical events such as the Holocaust to the seemingly inconsequential or banal: wallpaper, Christmas decorations or everyday objects for example.

The artist's sparsely-coloured figurative paintings are made up of quick brush strokes of wet paint.

Tuymans paints from photographic or cinematic images drawn from the media or public sphere, as well as from his own photographs and drawings.

They often appear intentionally out of focus.

The blurred effect is, however, created purposefully with painted strokes, it is not the result of a 'wiping away' technique.

Formal and conceptual oppositions recur in his work, which is echoed in his remark that while 'sickness should appear in the way the painting is made' there is also pleasure in its making – a 'caressing' of the canvas.

This reflects Tuymans' semantic shaping of the philosophical content of his work.

Often allegorical, his titles add a further layer of imagery to his work – a layer that exists beyond the visible.

The painting Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) exemplifies his use of titles to provoke associations in the mind of the viewer.

Meaning, in his work, is never fixed; his paintings incite thought.

A related characteristic of Tuymans' work is the way he often works in series, a method which enables one image to generate another through which images can be formulated and reformulated ad infinitum.

Images are repeatedly analysed and distilled, and a large number of drawings, photocopies and watercolours are produced in preparation for his oil paintings.

Each final painting is, however, completed in a single day.

Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel close to the city of Antwerp on 14 June 1958.

His father was Belgian Flemish and his mother was Dutch.

During World War II his mother's family joined the Dutch Resistance and hid refugees, whereas some members of his father's family allegedly had sympathised with Nazi ideology.

This fact echoed through family conversations, raising moral questions and feelings of guilt, and the subject became a source of fascination and fear, later playing a key role in Tuymans' painting.

His interest in art manifested itself at a young age, and his ability was first recognised during a summer holiday in Zundert, when he won a drawing competition.

He later said this event gave him a sense of the path he had to take.

When he was eight or nine, his uncle took him to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague where he saw a painting by Mondrian.

In a much later conversation, he explained how 'looking at that abstract painting was my first art experience.... I felt the magic of art in it....

I did understand the monumentality of that work.'

His first known painting dates from 1972 and the first public exhibited painting was created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait.

He was a student at the time, and submitted it to the national painting competition in Belgium, which he won.

Tuymans' formal art studies began at the age of 18 at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels (1976–79).

During this period he traveled to Budapest where he saw El Greco's paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts.

He continued his studies at the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre in Brussels (1979–80), before going to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1980–82), where he gave up painting for filmmaking.

From 1979 to 1980, Tuymans worked in collaboration with Marc Schepers on two local projects entitled Morguen.

The artists asked families from a neighbourhood in Antwerp for historical family photographs, a collection they built on with their own documentation of the area.

The following year, they published the project in the Tijdschrift voor levende Volkskunst (Journal of Living Folk Art), as a journal modelled on the historical Volksfoto magazine.

Six months later they organized a second photo project.

This time, they focused on the workers' district surrounding St. Andrew's Church, Antwerp.

Having completed his fine art studies, Tuymans enrolled for an academic degree in Art history at the Free University of Brussels (1982–86).

During the crucial first phase of Tuymans' artistic development, his painting method evolved rapidly, and his first solo and group exhibitions took place.

According to the catalogue raisonné, he created nearly 200 paintings on canvas or hardboard during this period.

In an interview in 2020, Tuymans described seeing these paintings as a shock, and discussed the fascination El Greco still holds for him today.