Luc
Tuymans (born in Mortsel in 1958) is regarded as one of the
most
significant and influential artists of our time. In 2004 he became
the
first living Belgian artist to have a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern
in
London; since then his international reputation has grown steadily.
Retrospective is his
first major retrospective exhibition
in
Belgium, co-organized by SFMOMA and the Wexner Center for the Arts. In
the
wake of an American tour that took it
to
Columbus, Ohio (Wexner Center for the Arts), San Francisco (Museum
of
Modern Art), Dallas (Museum of Art), and Chicago (Museum of
Contemporary
Art), the exhibition is now coming to Brussels. Retrospective
includes 73
works
(dating from 1978 to 2008), most of them from major series by the painter:
"At Random",
"Der Architekt",
"Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White
Man",
"Proper", and
"Der diagnostische
Blick".
The
works in the exhibition have been brought together from a great variety
of
locations: many of them from the United States, others from
Germany,
Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Japan. Both
major
museums (MoMA [UTF-8?]– NY, Guggenheim Museum [UTF-8?]– NY, Carnegie
Museum of Art
[UTF-8?]–
Pittsburgh, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection [UTF-8?]– Berlin, Museum
für
Moderne Kunst [UTF-8?]– Frankfurt, National Museum of Art [UTF-8?]–
Osaka, and others)
and
private collections have lent works. Many of these works have never
been
shown in Belgium
before.
Exclusively,
the Brussels exhibition is also screening compilations
of the Super 8 footage
Tuymans shot in 1980 and 1981. In 1980 Luc Tuymans
stopped
painting and turned to film. He experimented at that time with Super
8,
Super 16, and 35 mm film formats, until his return in 1985 to his
first
love, painting. These fragments already offer a foretaste of the
pictorial
idiom of the later
paintings.
This
is the third time the Centre for
Fine
Arts collaborates with Luc Tuymans.
He
was a co-curator of two exhibitions, The Forbidden
Kingdom
in 2007 and The State of Things in
2009.
This new exhibition, Retrospective,
presents work by the artist himself in the Centre for Fine Arts for
the
first
time.
Themes in the work of Luc
Tuymans
The
most important themes explored by Luc Tuymans in his work are those of
history, memory,
and the mass media. He has drawn
inspiration
from a great variety of subjects. He focuses on major historical
events
such as the aftermath of the Second World War, the dramatic upheavals
after
9/11, and the postcolonial period in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo.
Tuymans has a particular interest in the after-effects of these events
and
specifically in their representation in the mass media. He draws on the
historical traditions of Northern
European
painting, as well as photography, film,
and
television. He appropriates images from a great variety
of
sources and makes use of techniques such as cropping, close-ups,
framing,
and sequencing to offer fresh perspectives on the medium of painting
as
well as larger cultural issues.
At
first sight his paintings could be taken for relatively innocuous or
even
banal depictions of everyday life: interiors, landscapes, and
figurative
representations. But a deeper meaning usually lurks beneath
that
commonplace surface. Events and ideas are rarely presented explicitly,
but
are suggested through subtle hints and allusions that create an
ambiguous
collage of individual fragments and details. Tuymans represents
the unrepresentable in order
to
make viewers recognise their role as spectators [UTF-8?]– and often
unwilling
accomplices [UTF-8?]– of
history.
Tuymans treats
a
variety of genres [UTF-8?]– still life,
landscape,
and
portraiture [UTF-8?]– with the same scale and gravity once
reserved
for
grand history painting. Indeed, Tuymans may be said to have
reinvented
history painting for the present day, using moments from the recent past
to
shed light on the fragile nature of events. In depicting
contemporary
scenarios through this traditional painting genre, he also explores
the
possibility of disengagement from current realities and the ways in
which
the contemporary experience is often dramatically mediated by
both
technology and longstanding cultural narratives.
The series in Retrospective
The
exhibition reconstructs the early genesis of
the
[UTF-8?]artist’s distinctive process, highlighting the way in
which
he
moves fluidly from one painting to the next. Because Tuymans
experimented
with filmmaking early in his career, his strategy draws from theories
of
filmic montage: one image links to another, and additional meaning
is
conveyed by the [UTF-8?]pieces’ adjacency.
The
retrospective is a reconstruction of three complete series:
"At
Random", "Der Architekt", and "Mwana Kitoko:
Beautiful
White Man". It also includes works from the "Proper"
and
"Der diagnostische Blick" series, along with other works.
The
presentation is chronological, covering the period from 1978 to
2008.
The [UTF-8?]artist’s series At
Random explores the subject of perception and
disorienting
shifts in visual understanding. Shapes
and
outlines in these paintings emerge slowly from hazy backgrounds.
Sometimes
the title of a work helps bring a recognizable object into focus, as in
the
case of the The Doll (1994), which
first
appears to be a misty Northern landscape. [UTF-8?]It’s only after reading
the
title
and spending time in front of the canvas that it reveals more. The
pictures
that make up At Random seem exactly
that:
arbitrary and pulled from the stream of images one constantly encounters.
A
[UTF-8?]girl’s leg (in The
Leg
[1994]), a glimpse through a window (in Self-Portrait
[UTF-8?][1994])—each may seem insignificant and normally quickly
forgotten,
but
perhaps each conceals some secret within.
Der Architekt (The
Architect), [UTF-8?]Tuymans’s series devoted to the
Holocaust,
is the [UTF-8?]artist’s most comprehensive treatment of this recurring
topic in
his
oeuvre, yet the viewer is unlikely to come away with a better
understanding
of the atrocities that the word encompasses. This reflects
[UTF-8?]Tuymans’s
larger
[UTF-8?]point—that certain events defy representation. These mostly
monochromatic
canvases set up a visual correlation between the Nazi obsession with
Aryan
purity and the depravity of their actions. Himmler
(1998) draws on an official photographic portrait of SS official
Heinrich
Himmler, who oversaw the concentration camps. The details of his
face,
however, have been obscured, leaving only an impenetrable blur. The
title
of K.Z. (1998) is an abbreviation
of
the German term for concentration camp. But it too turns out to
be
misleading, showing only a portion of a camp specifically designed to
hide
its actual conditions from foreign inspectors.
In the series Mwana
Kitoko: Beautiful White Man, Tuymans confronts the
violent
legacy of his native [UTF-8?]Belgium’s involvement in the
Congo,
which was a Belgian colony from 1908 to 1960. This suite centers on
the
postcolonial situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
the
shadowy networks of power linked to the assassination of Patrice
Lumumba,
the first democratically elected prime minister of that country.
The Mission (2000) depicts the
place
where both Lumumba and his political rival Joseph-Désiré Mobutu
were
educated. Chalk (2000) references
a
story Tuymans heard about a police officer who pulled two teeth
from
[UTF-8?]Lumumba’s mouth after his death. Sculpture
(2000) brings this historical narrative into the present by depicting a
life-size
painted wood sculpture, a relic of the colonial era that
Tuymans
encountered by chance in a restaurant in
Antwerp.
The retrospective also gathers
a
selection of paintings from [UTF-8?]Tuymans’s post-9/11 series entitled
Proper,
which includes his unmistakable painting of Condoleezza Rice, The
Secretary of State (2005).
Looking
at American society and the Bush administration, Proper
explores the [UTF-8?]artist’s view of a country struggling to right itself
and,
in
the process, clinging to propriety in order to maintain an image
of
strength and normalcy. Ballroom
Dancing
(2005) portrays the newly revived phenomenon of its title, conveying
the
trappings of old-fashioned romance and gender roles in an image based on
a
photograph of the Texas [UTF-8?]Governor’s Ball. The odd observation angle
of
The Parc (2005) suggests the
view
from a security camera and so exposes the way surveillance has
permeated
daily life.
In
addition, the exhibition includes works from
[UTF-8?]Tuymans’s
Der diagnostische Blick
(The
Diagnostic View) series, which he based on images found in a
German
[UTF-8?]physician’s guide to physical manifestations of various
diseases
and ailments. With these works, Tuymans draws attention to the medium
of
painting itself, emphasizing the tensions between the handcraft of
painting
and the mechanical eye of
photography.
Biography of Luc
Tuymans
One
of the most influential artists working today, Luc [UTF-8?]Tuymans’s at
once
compelling and complex figurative style is widely seen as
having
contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. Using minimal
amounts
of paint while covering a broad range of subjects, including
political
figures and celebrities, deserted landscapes, nondescript
villas,
lampshades, pot plants, and pillow cases, Tuymans has been described as
a
master of the ordinary. Yet small clues within his delicately painted
works
often point towards a more sinister meaning, with subtle
references
frequently made to historical atrocities, collective traumas, and
the
manipulation strategies deployed by [UTF-8?]today’s mass media. Painting
from
pre-existing [UTF-8?]imagery—photographs, film-stills, newspaper
[UTF-8?]cuttings—Tuymans’s
works address the elusive gap between memory and reality, personal
space
and public space.
Born
in Mortsel, near Antwerp, Belgium in 1958, Tuymans studied fine art
in
Brussels and Antwerp between 1976-1982, before completing a degree in
Art
History at the Vrije Universiteit in 1986. In 1992, he participated in
the
prestigious Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, and he has since
exhibited
widely in Europe and Northern America. Tuymans represented Belgium at
the
Venice Biennale in 2001 and participated in his second Documenta in
2002.
Notable solo exhibitions include the Tate Modern in London
(2004),
Műcsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest (2007), Haus der Kunst (Munich) and
Zachęta National Gallery
of
Art (Warshaw). The [UTF-8?]artist’s first United States retrospective,
traveling
from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (2009) to the
San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010) and on to the Dallas Museum of
Art
(2010) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2010-2011) will
end
this tour at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2011). [UTF-8?]Tuymans’
works
are
featured in the permanent collections of prominent institutions,
including
the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los
Angeles
County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek
der
Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate
Gallery,
London. Tuymans lives and works in
Antwerp.
Curators: Madeleine
Grynsztejn,
Helen
Molesworth
Luc Tuymans [UTF-8?]–
Retrospective
is
organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wexner Center
for
the Arts,
The
Ohio State University,
Colombus
Generous support is provided by
Bruce
and Martha Atwater. Additional support is provided by Carla Emil and
Rich
Silverstein,
and Flanders House, the
new
cultural forum for Flanders (Belgium) in the United
States
With the support of:
Flemish
Community
Sponsor: Leon Eeckman
Art
Insurance
Partners: De Standaard,
Canvas
Video
material
Click
on
the links below to watch two interviews with the curators and with
Luc
Tuymans, at the opening of the Retrospective
exhibition in the Wexner Center for the Arts
(Columbus/Ohio).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCbtheilsI
http://www.ohiochannel.org/MediaLibrary/Media.aspx?fileId=123061
Practical
information
Luc
Tuymans
Retrospective
Address
BOZAR [UTF-8?]– Centre for Fine
Arts
Rue Ravensteinstraat
23
1000
Brussels
Dates
18.02.2011 >
08.05.2011
Opening
hours
From
Tuesdays to Sundays, 10 am > 6 pm
Thursdays,
10 am > 9
pm
Close on
Mondays
Price
€ 10,00: full
price
€ 8,00: over 60 / groups / under
26
€ 5,00: jobseekers /
schools
€ 9,00:
MYBOZAR
Free access: under
12
Info &
tickets
T. +32 (0)2 507 82 00 [UTF-8?]– www.bozar.be
>>
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