Люк Тюманс: Живопись памяти и истории

Belgian painter

Luc Tuymans (born 14 June 1958) is a Belgian visual artist best known for his paintings which explore people's relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it. World War II is a recurring theme in his work. He is a key figure of the generation of European figurative painters who gained renown at a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance due to the new digital age. Much of Tuymans' work deals with moral complexity, specifically the coexistence of 'good' and 'evil'. His subjects range from major historical events such as the Holocaust to the seemingly inconsequential or banal: wallpaper, Christmas decorations or everyday objects for example. The artist's sparsely coloured figurative paintings are made up of quick brush strokes of wet paint. Tuymans paints from photographic or cinematic images drawn from the media or public sphere, as well as from his own photographs and drawings. They often appear intentionally out of focus. Formal and conceptual oppositions recur in his work, which is echoed in his remark that while 'sickness should appear in the way the painting is made' there is also pleasure in its making – a 'caressing' of the canvas. This reflects Tuymans' semantic shaping of the philosophical content of his work. Often allegorical, his titles add a further layer of imagery to his work – a layer that exists beyond the visible. The painting Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) exemplifies his use of titles to provoke associations in the mind of the viewer. Meaning, in his work, is never fixed; his paintings incite thought. A related characteristic of Tuymans' work is the way he often works in series, a method which enables one image to generate another through which images can be formulated and reformulated ad infinitum. Images are repeatedly analysed and distilled, and a large number of drawings, photocopies and watercolours are produced in preparation for his oil paintings.

Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel close to the city of Antwerp on 14 June 1958. His father was Belgian Flemish and his mother was Dutch. During World War II his mother's family joined the Dutch Resistance and hid refugees, whereas some members of his father's family allegedly had sympathised with Nazi ideology. This fact echoed through family conversations, raising moral questions and feelings of guilt, and the subject became a source of fascination and fear, later playing a key role in Tuymans' painting. His interest in art manifested itself at a young age, and his ability was first recognised during a summer holiday in Zundert, when he won a drawing competition. He later said this event gave him a sense of the path he had to take. When he was eight or nine, his uncle took him to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague where he saw a painting by Mondrian. In a much later conversation, he explained how 'looking at that abstract painting was my first art experience I felt the magic of art in it I did understand the monumentality of that work.'

Tuymans' formal art studies began at the age of 18 at the Sint Lukasinstituut in Brussels (1976–79). During this period he traveled to Budapest where he saw El Greco's paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts. In an interview in 2020, Tuymans described seeing these paintings as a shock, and discussed the fascination El Greco still holds for him today. He continued his studies at the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre in Brussels (1979–80), before going to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1980–82), where he gave up painting for filmmaking. Having completed his fine art studies, Tuymans enrolled for an academic degree in Art history at the Free University of Brussels (1982–86).

During the crucial first phase of Tuymans' artistic development, his painting method evolved rapidly, and his first solo and group exhibitions took place. According to the catalogue raisonné, he created nearly 200 paintings on canvas or hardboard during this period. His first known painting dates from 1972 and the first public exhibited painting was created in 1977, entitled Self Portrait. He was a student at the time, and submitted it to the national painting competition in Belgium, which he won. From 1979 to 1980, Tuymans worked in collaboration with Marc Schepers on two local projects entitled Morguen. The artists asked families from a neighbourhood in Antwerp for historical family photographs, a collection they built on with their own documentation of the area. The following year, they published the project in the Tijdschrift voor levende Volkskunst (Journal of Living Folk Art), as a journal modelled on the historical Volksfoto magazine. Six months later they organized a second photo project. This time, they focused on the workers' district surrounding St. Andrew's Church, Antwerp. Between 1980 and 1985, Tuymans stopped painting, dedicating himself to experimentation with film. Among other film projects, he created Feu d’artifice (Firework) and made plans for an unrealized, semi documentary feature film. Some of the film fragments he made later served as inspiration for paintings. When Tuymans resumed painting in 1985, he changed his technique, and since then he never spent more than a day working on a painting. From 1978 on, Tuymans' paintings centred on European memories of World War II, confronting Adorno's famous question whether art was impossible following the holocaust, and 'the collapse of any coherent tradition in painting' described by Peter Schjeldahl. One of his works from this period is a small painting of the gas chamber in Dachau, entitled Gaskamer (Gas Chamber), 1986. This painting was based on a watercolour he had done on site. As J. S. Marcus from The Wall Street Journal wrote, the painting 'simplified the means of painting flattened the perspective, muted the colour and the direction of the composition To save the painting he almost makes it disappear.' Other paintings that date from this period are the 1988 four part painting Die Zeit (The Time) in which Tuymans combines a portrait of the  Nazi frontman Reinhard Heydrich with two spinach tablets and a cityscape, and the 1989 painting Die Wiedergutmachung (The Reparation) that depicts the eyes of gypsy children who had been experimented on by the Nazis. From the late 1970s, Tuymans also began to paint portraits of himself and imaginary portraits, anonymous individuals, and historical and public figures. Superficially, most of these images seem to be traditional portraits; the approach is dispassionate and not psychological. His portraits strip individuality away, leaving the body resembling a shell, the face a mask. Another example of his figurative portrait work is Der diagnostische Blick (The Diagnostic Look), a series of ten paintings from 1992 based on clinical images of bodies and body parts he found in a physician's manual on physical diseases. As Meyer Hermann wrote in the catalogue raisonné, the artist first elucidated his theoretical approach in an unrealized proposal for a group exhibition, entitled Virus of the Vanities. Here, he defines key terms and develops a dialectic between the 'virus' as representative of the 'cult', and 'vanity' as a projection of 'culture', also opposing the 'anecdotal' (as in the portrait or still life) to the 'symbolic' (as in representations of time or death). Tuymans refers to nine of his paintings dating from 1978 to 1990 to support his ideas.

Drawing has been integral to Tuymans' artistic practice from the start. Sketches, watercolours and other small scale works form the bedrock of his work for they constitute, for him, a way of thinking through an idea. Important features of Tuymans' artistic approach can be found in these preparatory pieces such as his voluntary choice of low quality materials and his incorporation of found elements. Such works are both visual preparations for later paintings and exteriorisations of thought processes. As Tuymans said in an interview with Josef Helfenstein in 1997: 'drawing is particularly important because I become mentally involved in the work and the picture. What is important for me is the idea of thinking while I draw, particularly in the tiny drawings. It helps to have everything under control'. Elsewhere in the interview, Tuymans explained that he mostly draws from memory and that he finds it better not to start drawing immediately when he sees something, but that he draws 'on the basis of a fragmentary memory.' This is elaborated on later in the 1997 interview with Helfenstein, when he describes how he usually prefers to draw after seeing something, 'on the basis of a fragmentary memory'. Each drawing is more than a visual record: it forms part of a wider reflective process. The first comprehensive exhibition of Tuymans' drawings and other works on paper from the years 1975–96 was on view in an exhibition that travelled to Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; and Capc Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux (in 1997–98).

Tuymans has made about 50 site specific murals since the mid 1990s, five permanent and the rest temporary. Unlike the permanent mural paintings, Tuymans other mural paintings are temporary events and installations created for exhibitions. The type of mural techniques used is either acrylic paint or fresco applied directly on the existing wall surfaces. On rare occasions, he also made textile murals, which are based on drawings that are scanned and mechanically produced. As he said in a video interview he gave about the triptych mural painting S. Croce (2010), they are always related to the 'raw space' and 'it is the element of approach which is important with murals', he also mentioned that 'If I work on a wall I feel much more free than on a canvas.' The first permanent mural was created in 1995 in Antwerp at Café Alberto. It features a larger version of the painting Superstition. In 2007 Tuymans executed a permanent mural based on Bloodstains (1993) on the ceiling of the ballroom of the former Ringtheater. This same year, the building was taken over by Troubleyn/Laboratorium, the performance company run by the Belgian playwright and artist Jan Fabre. In February 2012, Tuymans used the motif of Angel for a permanent mural created in the second balcony foyer of the Concertgebouw Brugge. Tuymans gave the Staatsschauspiel Dresden two permanent murals created for the main staircases of the building on Theaterstrasse in 2013. These two murals are based on the paintings Peaches (2012) and Technicolor (2012). The installation began in the winter of 2009 and was finished in the summer of 2010. Dead Skull is hardly distinguishable as an image when you are on the ground floor, but the higher you climb in the MAS, the more clearly the skull becomes visible. The second mosaic Tuymans made was Schwarzheide, made at the time of his exhibition La Pelle at Palazzo Grassi in 2019. This work was produced by Fantini Mosaici in Milan and is based on Tuymans' eponymous oil on canvas dated 1989 representing a German forced labour camp. The full image could only be seen from the balustrades, overlooking the atrium of Palazzo Grassi. Due to the floods that hit Venice in February 2020, the site specific mosaic was dismantled.

Tuymans experimented with printmaking from the late 1980s on, producing a graphic oeuvre of about 90 works, which focus – like his paintings – on the mediation and translation of images in the mass media. He has explored various printing methods such as photocopy, inkjet, offset, monotype, screen printing, lithography, etching, and silver gelatine prints, using unusual supports such as wallpaper, security glass and PVC. In a similar way to his paintings, his printed images often appear blurred or reduced. They are frequently based on photographs or film stills, which the artist photographs and re photographs until much of the original detail is lost. The four colour etching Isabel, Diorama, Scramble, Twenty Seventeen (2017) for example, is based on iPhone photographs Tuymans took while painting. These images reveal an early, unfinished stage of the work. The paint strokes Tuymans placed in the margin of the painting and at the edges of the canvas are also incorporated in the etched image. Most of Tuymans' prints are made in collaboration with Antwerp based master printer Roger Vandaele and Edition Copenhagen.

Tuymans is also a curator. The first exhibition he curated was Trouble Spot: Painting in 1999 at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the NICC – New International Centre in Antwerp. This show included works by about 50 artists, including Gerhard Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Raoul De Keyser, Marlene Dumas, and Andy Warhol. In 2002, he curated Kamers. een keuze van Luc Tuymans (Rooms. A choice by Luc Tuymans) at Ruimte Morguen in Antwerp. The following curated event took place on 5 October 2006, Tuymans organized Sirene/Alarm, an event that spanned numerous museums and cultural institutions in Belgium. All participating museums were asked to set their alarms to go off at 3 pm. Staff, artists, students, and other supporters evacuated the buildings involved for fifteen minutes. The event was a plea for tolerance; a statement against political extremism, racism, and violence. In 2007 Tuymans curated the exhibition The Forbidden Empire: Visions of the World by Chinese and Flemish Artists at BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels. The exhibition was co curated with Yu Hui and travelled to the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The following exhibition he curated was Reconsidered. Luc Tuymans: Selected Works from the Städel Collection, an exhibition held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main in 2009. Following the Chinese/Flemish exhibition The Forbidden Empire, Tuymans curated in 2010, The State of Things: Brussels/Beijing, a cross cultural exhibition that combined Belgian and Chinese art at BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, which then travelled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. In 2011, Angel Vergara invited Tuymans to curate the Angel Vergara: Feuilleton exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion at the 54th International Biennale di Venezia. In 2011, he also organized the exhibition A Vision of Central Europe for Brugge Centraal. As stated on Phaidon's website, Tuymans' starting point for this exhibition was the difference between the cities of Bruges and Warsaw: one survived World War II relatively unscathed, the other was decimated, then carefully reconstructed. Two years later, he curated The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium at the London Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, and in 2013, he collaborated with Dr Ulrich Bischoff on the exhibition Constable, Delacroix, Friedrich, Goya. A Shock to the Senses at the Albertinum in Dresden, an exhibition that traced the history of European painting from 1800 to the present, juxtaposing important works of European Romanticism with later modern and contemporary art. and James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The most recent exhibition Tuymans curated is Sanguine/Bloedrood. Luc Tuymans on Baroque, which opened in 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp then travelling to the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

Tuymans has also engaged in pedagogical work, and was a guest tutor at the Dutch institute Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, where he mentored and influenced emerging painters such as the Polish artist Paulina Olowska, and the Serbian born artist Ivan Grubanov. In 2008, Tuymans took on the Max Beckmann Foundation Professorship at the Städelschule, a role previously held by William Kentridge. Tuymans chose Ostend because of James Ensor and Leon Spilliaert, two painters who had a profound influence on his artistic development and whose connection with the city gave it a spiritual significance for him. Besides his parents and a handful of friends, few people saw the exhibition, but it was nonetheless crucial, because it was the first time Tuymans saw his work outside the studio. The next public exhibition of Tuymans' work was held at Ruimte Morguen in Antwerp in 1988 Tuymans concluded this first period of his career with a retrospective exhibition held in Krefeld in 1993 at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefelder Kunstmuseen in the two residential houses turned contemporary art museums Haus Lange and Haus Esters. In 1994, his work was shown at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, an exhibition that travelled to the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, the artist's U. S. gallery. That same year, he had a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto which moved on to The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, the ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. In 2001, Tuymans represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale. Between 2004 and 2008, solo exhibitions devoted to Tuymans were held in diverse locations: at Tate Modern in London in 2004; at Museu Serralves in Porto; at Museu Serralves in Porto; at Műcsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest in 2007–8; at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2008. The artist's first comprehensive U. S. retrospective opened in September 2009 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio, then travelling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. This retrospective also travelled beyond the U. S. to BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, in Belgium. Also in 2009, an exhibition of works inspired by one of Tuymans' favourite authors, Thomas Pynchon, called Against the Day, was held at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, subsequently travelling to Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. A major solo exhibition was put on in 2015 at QM Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, entitled Intolerance, and in 2019, Tuymans' major exhibition La pelle was staged at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. This show incorporated 80 paintings dating from 1986 to 2019.

In 2007, Tuymans was appointed Commander of the Order of Leopold of Belgium by King Albert II, in 2013, he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin. In 2019 he received the Medal of Honor from the International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP) in Porto in Portugal. Tuymans holds several academic honours, including an honorary doctorate for overall cultural merit bestowed by the Royal College of Art in 2015, an honorary doctorate bestowed by the University of Arts in Poznań in 2014, and an honorary doctorate for overall cultural merit bestowed by the University of Antwerp in 2006. In 2008, Tuymans received the Max Beckmann Foundation award at the Städelschule. In 2000, he was a finalist for the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe and won the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation award in Zurich. In 2013, Tuymans was awarded the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts and in 2020 the Ultima award for 'General Cultural Merit'. In 1998, he received the biannual Culture Prize Blanlin Evrart from the Catholic University of Leuven. In 2013, he was given the award of excellence for his artistic contributions to the fight against AIDS by the AmfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research Awards.

Tuymans was born in Mortsel near Antwerp on 14 June 1958, and he continues to live in Antwerp today. His father, Antoon Tuymans, was Belgian Flemish and his mother, Elisabeth Dam, was Dutch.