Luc Tuymans: Nice

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity.

＂Once Tuymans’s muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.＂ --Jason Farago, The New York Times

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources.

This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasp the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: Good Luck, at David Zwirner, Hong Kong; Eternity, at David Zwirner, Paris; and The Barn, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With texts by the novelist Joshua Cohen, the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) 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, frequently 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.

Joshua Cohen’s books include the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (2007), A Heaven of Others (2008), Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017); the short-fiction collection Four New Messages (2012), and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction (2018). Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His most recent novel, The Netanyahus (2021), won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His books include Techniques of the Observer (1990), Suspensions of Perception (1999), 24/7 (2013), and Tricks of the Light (2023).

Lynne Tillman writes novels, stories, and essays. Her most recent work is Mothercare (2022), an autobiographical book-length essay. Tillman’s essays and stories are published in Frieze, Aperture, Tank, and N+1; her essays on contemporary artists, such as Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Dennis Cooper, Amy Sillman, Robert Gober, and On Kawara, have appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues. Tillman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and, in recognition of her contribution to literature, the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.