‘Luc Tuymans: Shell Game’ by Daniel Merritt
2026
Luc Tuymans is smoking a cigarette outside of his studio when I arrive. It's October 12, 2025 - a Sunday - in Antwerp, and the streets are vacant, save for the artist. We walk through a garage-like passage where the studio opens up, and I encounter the new paintings that Crum Base, presented at David Zwirner’s New York and Los Angeles galleries, one after the other, on a bicoastal tour.I see the entire show, but scrambled in his studio. The title work, a twenty-three-foot-wide painting i n nine parts, is partially deconstructed and spread across two walls. Cast in a palette of hyperlink blue, the massive still life depicts a basket of fermented fruit traditionally given to winners of the Premio Malaparte. Tuymans was present in 2022 when American writer Daniel Mendelsohn was awarded the Italian literary prize, and he first saw the basket projected on a television screen as it entered the frame of an abandoned camera that had been left recording. The object was both pathetic and endearing: a vessel of tradition, but one that felt empty and sickly.