Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?

Publisher: Phaidon

Publication Date: 2010

Edited by Pablo Sigg and Tommy Simoens. Texts by Luc Tuymans, Pablo Sigg, Tommy Simoens, and Gerrit Vermeiren

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this volume presents more than 100 paintings produced between 2004 and 2008. Beginning with Les Cinq Anneaux and concluding with Against the Day, Luc Tuymans produced a landmark suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work. With a visual narrative that traces the philosophical and psychic roots of contemporary civilization, the series interweave a range of sources — from St. Peter’s Basilica to Disneyland to the Big Brother house — that together tell the banal and terrifying story of our times. Also included are photographs, preparatory drawings, watercolors, and installation views, all in full color.

Introducing each body of work is a text written by the artist. ‘Proper,’ an essay by Belgian art historian Gerrit Vermeiren, looks at one body of work in detail, tracing the themes of each painting and capturing the cultural atmosphere of the moment in which they were produced. ‘Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz,’ specially commissioned from Pablo Sigg, an artist and writer based in Mexico, provides historical and philosophical context. An extensive interview by Belgian artist Tommy Simoens offers further insight into Tuymans’s thinking and motivations.

Details

Publisher: Phaidon

Artist: Luc Tuymans

Publication Date: 2010

ISBN: 9780714856032

Retail: $70 US & Canada | £48 | €63

Status: Out Of Print

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 10 x 11 1/4 in (25.4 x 28.6 cm)

Pages: 224

Artist and Contributors

Luc Tuymans

One of the most important painters working today, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. The artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of sources and rendered in a restrained palette that belies an underlying moral complexity.

$52.50

$70