Luc Tuymans Good Luck

Widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans continues to expand our understanding of the medium. Sourcing imagery from books, magazines, films, the internet, and increasingly his own iPhone photos, Tuymans’s unique selection of subject matter reveals his fascination with moral complexities. Exploring diverse and sensitive topics, many of which include historic references from World War II to more contemporary events such as 9/11, Tuymans presents imagery that at first seems innocuous or approachable but upon deeper inspection can be entirely unsettling. Achieved through his masterful handling of paint, his works are often suggestive of memories or familiar people, places, and things. The latest in the Spotlight Series, which focuses on new bodies of work by contemporary artists, Tuymans continues to take on increasingly complex subject matters in his primarily muted palette. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, this book features an essay by art critic Su Wei, who approaches Tuymans’s newest paintings and how they expand his oeuvre.

Learn how to jump-start your imagination to conjure up innovative, worthwhile ideas with help from some of the greatest artists in the world. How do artists think? Where does their creativity originate? How can we, too, learn to be more creative? BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz seeks answers to these questions in his exuberant, intelligent, witty, and thought-provoking style. Think Like an Artist identifies ten key lessons on creativity from artists that range from Caravaggio to Warhol, Da Vinci to Ai Weiwei, and profiles leading contemporary figures in the arts who are putting these skills to use today. After getting up close and personal with some of the world’s leading creative thinkers, Gompertz has discovered traits that are common to them all. He outlines basic practices and processes that allow your talents to flourish and enable you to embrace your inner Picasso—no matter what you do for a living. With wisdom, inspiration, and advice from an author named one of the fifty most original thinkers in the world by Creativity magazine, Think Like an Artist is an illuminating view into the habits that make people successful. It’s time to get inspired and think like an artist!

Luc Tuymans is one of todays most widely admired painters, an heir to the great tradition of Northern European painting and an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. As a European child of the 1950s, his relationship to painting is inevitably structured by television, cinema and by the lingering effects ofWorldWar II; more recent historical preoccupations have included the dramatic turn of world events post-9/11. Tuymans combines a muted palette with deteriorated surface effect and a singular use of cropping, close-up and sequencing perfect devices with which to undertake his investigation of the pathological, the banal and the conspiratorial. Published in conjunction with the artists first full-scale American survey, this is without question the authoritative publication on Tuymans. It features approximately 80 key works from 1985 to the present, and is accompanied by essays analysing the painters main concerns, with particular attention paid to his working process and his adaptation of source materials. Exhibition co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn shows that although Tuymans remains loyal to painting as a medium, his tendency to work in suites, and at an increasing scale, also relates his work to current installation and site-specific art. Co-curator Helen Molesworth examines themes of sinister banality, Joseph Leo Koerner writes on iconophobia and iconophilia, Ian Buruma addresses political aspects of Tuymanss work and his relationship to photography, and Bill Horrigan examines cinematic sources. This book is not only the most comprehensive survey of Tuymans's career to date, but also the most thorough chronology of his artistic development.

The third volume of a catalogue raisonné of Luc Tuymans’s paintings, surveying nearly two hundred works, charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology. Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice and are typically painted from preexisting imagery that includes photographs and video stills. The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The Internet, in particular, is central to these works as well as the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings. This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

Beginning with 'Gilles de Binche' (Antwerp, 2005) and concluding with 'Against the Day' (Brussels, Moscow and Malmo, 2009-10), acclaimed painter Luc Tuymans produced a landmark suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work. Their meta-narrative, which traces the philosophical and psychic roots of contemporary civilization, weaves together a range of photographic source images, from St Peter's to Disneyland to Big Brother, that together tell the banal and terrifying story of our times. Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? features this source imagery alongside more than 100 of the artist's newest paintings, many never before published. Accompanying each body of work is an introductory text written by the artist, while the essay 'Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz', specially commissioned by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg, provides historical and philosophical context. 'Proper', an essay by Belgian art historian Gerrit Vermeiren, looks at one body of work in detail, tracing the themes and sources of each painting and capturing the cultural atmosphere of the moment in which they were produced. And an extensive interview between Tuymans and his assistant Tommy Simoens offers additional insight into the artist's thinking and motivations. Celebrated as one of the world's most gifted and visionary painters, Tuymans has been creating iconic works of contemporary painting for nearly three decades. With their enigmatic compositions and modulated colours, these works are moving and unmistakable, and their power continues to win new converts to Tuymans's chilling vision of history painting.

This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, features the Belgian artist’s most recent work. Here, his fascination with Scottish light and its thinkers, who believed in the perfectibility of man, becomes apparent. Inspired by a visit to the art collection of the University of Edinburgh, Tuymans realised three small portraits of Scottish philosophers. Besides the theme of light, the notion of impending horror also plays a role in a monumental dark work, ‘The Shore’, which refers to Goya, and in the portrait of Issei Sagawa, a cannibalistic murderer. Includes a short story by British author Will Self and an essay by art historian Collin Chinnery. 00Exhibition: Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (31.10-19.12.2015)

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.

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.

In 1957-58, after he moved to New York's Lower East Side, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) began making collages he has described as "mostly done in an uncontrolled and intuitive dream mode." Made from found, printed imagery, the Strange Eggs are enigmatic, surrealistic, and vastly different from the Pop art of the 1960s for which he soon became famous. These collages are characterized by self-contained forms, or eggs, the artist made by melding cut fragments of photographic illustrations. While many of the pieces are unrecognizable, some original references are discernible: a piece of pie, the hind leg of a horse, the creased skin of a clenched fist, and the texture of concrete. These eighteen collages were first shown at the Menil Collection in 2012, and they are being published together for the first time, along with poems that the artist wrote at the same time based on found imagery from his walks around New York's Lower East Side. Anticipating second-generation New York School art-poetry collaborations by half a decade, Strange Eggs makes an important single-artist contribution to our understanding of the period. Distributed for The Menil Collection

A comprehensive look at four transformative decades that put Mexico's modern art on the map In the wake of the 1910-20 Revolution, Mexico emerged as a center of modern art, closely watched around the world. Highlighted are the achievements of the tres grandes (three greats)--José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros--and other renowned figures such as Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo, but the book goes beyond these well-known names to present a fuller picture of the period from 1910 to 1950. Fourteen essays by authors from both the United States and Mexico offer a thorough reassessment of Mexican modernism from multiple perspectives. Some of the texts delve into thematic topics--developments in mural painting, the role of the government in the arts, intersections between modern art and cinema, and the impact of Mexican art in the United States--while others explore specific modernist genres--such as printmaking, photography, and architecture. This beautifully illustrated book offers a comprehensive look at the period that brought Mexico onto the world stage during a period of political upheaval and dramatic social change. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (10/25/16-01/08/17) Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (02/03/17-04/30/17) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June-September 2017)