Luc Tuymans: The Barn
David Zwirner is pleased to present new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) on view at the gallery’s West 20th Street location in New York. One of the most important painters working today, Tuymans 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. Tuymans has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994; this is the celebrated artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in the United States since 2016.
Continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world, Tuymans’s compositions remain deeply resonant through their insistence on the ambiguity of meaning. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his paintings are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or fading memory. In recent years, the artist has increasingly turned to the internet as a font of visual material, cannily selecting images—which he often rephotographs with his iPhone before translating onto canvas—that straddle the mundane and the profound.
Tuymans rose to international acclaim in the early 1990s with a solo presentation at Kunsthalle Bern (1992) and participation in documenta IX (1992), alongside his traveling solo exhibition Superstition, which originated at Portikus, Frankfurt, and toured several North American venues in 1994–1995, beginning with David Zwirner New York, then in its second year of programming. Since that time, the artist’s work has been shown widely at prestigious venues around the world, including representing Belgium at the 2001 Venice Biennale; an acclaimed presentation at documenta 11 in 2002; and a US retrospective that originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio in 2009, and traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; among many others.
Image: Luc Tuymans’s studio, 2023.