November 2025
Luc Tuymans first met Yohji Yamamoto on a visit to Japan with his wife, the Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha, in 1999. The Belgian painter had opened his debut exhibition with David Zwirner in New York a few years earlier. He was fascinated with the Japanese designer’s simultaneous precision and undone ease—qualities evident in his own politically oriented paintings.
Who could have predicted that, more than 25 years later, the two men would still be friends, savoring simultaneous career milestones (at 82, Yamamoto’s business is generating more than $200 million a year; Tuymans, 67, opened a show of large-scale works, his 18th with Zwirner, in New York this November). Just days after Yamamoto debuted his Spring/Summer 2026 collection at an October Paris Fashion Week show Tuymans attended, the pair reunited at Yamamoto HQ for a cigarette and a chat about anger, black clothes, and cowboys with their frequent sparring partner, the writer Donatien Grau.
