Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light.

An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone.

In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues, though using no actual black pigment, applied by hand in thick bands around their borders.

One group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. Hollow (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. The smallest work in the show, The Maggot (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound.

From the same group of works, Migrants (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image.

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects.

Likewise, the last painting in the show, The Family (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

Paintings from this group both open and close the exhibition. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with.