Luc Tuymans: Superstition

The first volume of a comprehensive record of paintings by the prolific Belgian artist Luc Tuymans highlights his generative early work.

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Tuymans continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works that were vital to his artistic development. The years 1972 to 1994 witnessed the maturation of his signature method of painting from preexisting imagery—such as magazine images, Polaroids, and television footage—as well as his first solo exhibitions. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, including Gaskamer and Schwarzheide (both 1986), which were part of the artist’s first gallery solo exhibition in 1988; Die Zeit (1988), a four-part work shown in his critically acclaimed Documenta presentation in 1992; along with Der diagnostische Blick (1992), a group of ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body.