Luc Tuymans: Paintings April 13, 2010

Influenced by the Northern European painting tradition as well as by photography, television and cinema, Luc Tuymans blends filmic techniques with a mastery of painting to explore issues of history, memory and the mass media. The artist has addressed the lingering effects of World War II, the postcolonial situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11, topics that have led him to a sustained investigation of the pathological and the conspiratorial. Making ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing and sequencing, Tuymans's paintings initially suggest relatively innocuous depictions of everyday life -- but another meaning almost always lurks beneath their surfaces. This is the first U.S. retrospective for the Belgian artist and the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date, with approximately 75 key paintings from 1985 to the present.