Background

Luc Tuymans was born in 1958 in Mortsel, Antwerpen, Belgium. His mother’s family fully supported Dutch resistance and hid refugees, while his father kept a secret for years of two of his brothers being members of Hitler Youth.

Education

Luc Tuymans began his education at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels (today the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel) in 1976. He switched schools in order to find his way, so from 1979 to 1980, he was connected with fine arts at the L'École de la Cambre and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where he had studied for two years. Unsatisfied with painting, at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels he studied art history between 1982 and 1986.

Tuymans holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. On July 3, 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art.

Career

Tuymans started working in a specific period where a traditional painting was not seen as the potent ground for delivering contemporary subjects. Nevertheless, Tuymans introduced a different conceptual approach since started processing rather painful chapters of our history. The very need to articulate the aftermaths of severe atrocities, colonization, political or religious extremism reveal that his general agenda is aimed at criticizing repressive political mechanisms or respectively any form of right-wing practice, discourse or imagery. The critical discourse about the hypocrisy, fanaticism, racial intolerance the artist raises are more than relevant and call for constant debate, especially in the current state of contemporary societies.

Thematizing the trauma of World War II was of greatest importance for many artists of Tuymans generation. Yet, the way he personally chose to articulate it was by far the approach which went on dealing with the thesis of Europe’s psychological breakdown. Those paintings are almost dried out depictions of gas chambers, clothes, body parts or in a more symbolical manner a portrait of Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of Nazi party, or Albert Speer, architect of the Third Reich. Whether it is just an object or a person, Tuymans skillfully and with great effort undermines the banality of evil.

Although the whole body of Tuymans’s work can be categorized as figurative, the very use of sparsely-coloured technique made them be often perceived as abstract. That can be discussed but only on the purely aesthetical ground, since the concept behind the works is always thoroughly thought in a rather strong socio-political direction. Yet, it is exactly this ambiguity that makes them so staggering and exceptional.

The preparation for the process is embedded in vast research and covers different visual materials from including drawings, photographs, and film stills and can last months, even years. Commonly, the motifs are almost washed away and formed as specific signifiers of various phenomena. The way Tuymans performs the drawing is reminiscent of both Flemish Old Masters and mass media. By appropriating different compositional angles, fleet brush strokes of wet paint on wet paint, and out-of-focus framing, Tuymans creates blurry and almost delusional images of faded memories. He often produces series and all of his works are deeply rooted in a tenacious philosophical frame.

In 2001 at the prestigious Venice Biennale, Tuymans presented himself with the series of paintings which critically dealt with a history of Belgian imperial rule in the Congo. Especially, the portrait of Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese independence leader and the first democratically elected leader of the Congo as prime minister, stood up from the whole constellation. After showing these intense works by deploying the subject of the aftermath of colonization, Tuymans became labelled as a political artist. The artist was not very fond of this label, so the following year at Documenta 11 he showed a simple still-life executed on a massive scale regardless of social and political upheavals of the time. That was a deliberate decision in order to ignore all possible references so that led to negative critiques from both public and art professionals.

Besides his ongoing painterly practice, Luc Tuymans was involved in several curatorial projects and has organized a series of exhibitions and programs. Among the most important ones was the one done for the inaugural Bruges Central art festival in Bruges in 2010 - 2011, where Tuymans was co-curator, and a notable exhibition Constable, Delacroix, Friedrich, Goya.

The artist is a current lecturer and engaged in pedagogical work especially at Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, where he mentored and significantly influenced emerging painters. Among his students were Paulina Olowska and Ivan Grubanov.

In January 2015, the artist was accused of plagiarism. Apparently, he used the photograph of Katrijin Van Giel as the basis for his painting "A Belgian Politician" made in 2011. It was a portrait of a Belgian right-wing politician Jean-Marie Dedecker. Despite claiming it was an act of appropriation and that the painting was a critique of what did that figure represent, the court found Tuymans guilty. Later that year, the artist and the photographer came to the confidential solution of the out-of-court settlement.

The number of collections which included his works is huge spanning from New York’s MOMA, over Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, to Centre Pompidou in Paris, just to mention the few. Finally, it is not only the decisiveness to remain loyal to painting that made Tuymans one of the greatest contemporary painters, rather it is the constant focus on the importance of the message the artist is eager to deliver. The continuous task to alarm people of all the horridness of what nationalism is and can be suggested that art should not just be the mere expression of pleasant patterns, forms, and thoughts, yet it should serve as a tool for emancipatory processes and betterment of society. Luc Tuymans currently lives and works in Antwerp.

Achievements

• 

  Luc Tuymans is one of the most distinguished painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. His artworks have been exhibited in such countries as the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, etc. Of all the paintings that Tuymans has executed, he is perhaps best known for such pieces as Gas Chamber, Mwana Kitoko, and Against The Day.
  
  In 2005, Sculpture (2000), part of Luc Tuymans' Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man series, was sold at Christie's New York, for $1,472,000.
  
  He was honoured by the Belgian government when they bestowed upon him the title of Commander, Order of Leopold in 2007. In 2013, Tuymans received the amfAR Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS in recognition of his continuous support of amfAR’s programs.
  
  Tuymans' works can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Turtle

  • The Radiance of Attention

  • The Leg

  • Against the Day

  • Fortune

  • G. Dam

  • A Flemish Intellectual

  • Epcot

  • Blacklight

  • The Blue Oak

  • Maypole

  • Wandeling

  • Easter

  • Leopard

  • The cry

  • Untitled

  • Petrus & Paulus

  • Untitled

  • The walk

  • Frank

  • The Parc

  • Imperméable

  • Bend Over

  • Suicide

  • Hut

  • The time

  • The time

  • Eyes Without a Face

  • Body

  • Secrets

  • Lumumba

  • Dirt Road - Tropical Institute

  • The Servant

  • Flemish village

  • Soldier

  • Silent Music

  • The time

  • Within

  • Parachutists

  • Auschwitz

  • Superstition

  • Dead skull

  • Big Brother

  • Apple

  • Stranger on a Train

  • The Heritage

  • Orchid

  • The diagnostic of view I

  • Fingers

  • Altar

  • Suspended

  • The Heritage

  • Still Life

  • Plant

  • W

  • Himmler

  • Oberammargau

  • Against the Day II

  • Reparation

  • Bloodstains

  • Hair

  • The Doll

  • The time

  • The Secretary of State

  • Five years

  • Silence

  • Dirty road

  • Salon

  • Portrait

  • Pigeons

  • The Worshipper

  • The diagnostic of view V

  • Schwarzheide

  • Gas Chamber

  • Flowers

  • The Nose

  • Yzer-Tower

  • Mayhem

  • Angel

  • Pharmacy

  • Ballroom Dancing

  • Neck

  • Insomnia

  • An architect

  • Mwana Kitoko

  • Solitude

Views

Luc Tuymans adheres to the artistic traditions of New European Painting. Tuyman’s works examine cultural memory through a muted palette and choppy brushstrokes, lending the paintings an ambiguous meaning.

To his mind, artwork should point in more than one direction, and not be this sort of placating, self-demonstrating, witnessing element.

Quotations: "If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. There is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer."

"When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making paintings, you know exactly what you are doing."

"All art is a failure. How one fails is a different matter."

"It is not important to convince people; they should convince themselves, they should look with their own eyes."

"Every painting has a weakness and a breaking point, where the essence of a painting lies. In my case it is never in the centre."

"Painted time is a different zone. This is why I don't believe that a painting - although I've been accused of it many times now - can be truly topical. A painting's physicality gives it a different persistence and a different perception."

Interests

• Artists

  El Greco

Connections

Tuymans is married to Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha. They live and work in Antwerp. He is good friends with fellow artist Stan Douglas, and with an older generation of American painters, such as Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly.

Spouse:

Carla Arocha

Carla Arocha (born in 1961) is a Venezuelan-born artist. She has been working in collaboration with Stéphane Schraenen since 2005. With Schraenen, she created work poised at the narrow edge of art, design and environment. Together they exhibit worldwide.

Friend:

Stanley Douglas

Joseph Stanley Douglas (1903-1971) was an English first-class cricketer, who played 23 matches for Yorkshire County Cricket Club between 1925 and 1934.

Friend:

Alex Katz

Alex Katz (born in 1927) is an American artist, who represents Pop Art and New Realism movements. He is mostly known for his large-scale depictions of landscapes, flowers and portraits.

Friend:

Chuck Close

Chuck Close (born in 1940) is an American artist and photographer. He is famous for his huge Photo-realist portraits and self- portraits. He often uses a photo of a person as the initial source for his portraits. The artist usually makes his canvases through a grid system each square of which corresponds to the pixel on the reference photo.

Friend:

Brice Marden

Brice Marden (born in 1938) is an American artist, who represents Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism movements. His works were influenced by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as Asian art and calligraphy.

Friend:

Ellsworth Kelly

References

• Luc Tuymans: Intolerance Luc Tuymans: Intolerance, published to accompany a major retrospective at the Qatar Museums in Doha (the artist’s first show in the Gulf region), surveys Tuymans’ work from the past 25 years.
  2016
• Luc Tuymans: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Volume One: 1972-1994 This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works from the vital early years of his career
  2018
• Luc Tuymans This book is not only the most comprehensive survey of Tuymans' career to date, but also the most thorough chronology of his artistic development.
  2009
• Luc Tuymans Book by Ulrich Loock.
  2003