Luc Tuymans is a painter from Antwerp who has been painting and exhibiting his work in Belgium for over 15 years. Recently his work has been recognized in exhibitions at prominent venues outside of Belgium. The exhibition at the AGYU was his first in North America. Organized by Toronto independent curator Gregory Salzman, the show traveled to The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Goldie Paley Art Gallery, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, England.

The referentiality of Tuymans’ imagery is ambiguous yet the images are psychologically compelling. Tuymans’ art implicates entangled themes such as consumerism, fascism, the culture industry, luxury, spectacle, power, artistic virtuosity and painting’s aura. His paintings are representations of representations that are predicated on memories and their betrayal. They combine minimalism’s insistence on the art object’s specificity with the postmodern condition of intertextuality. His art joins the lightness, precision and economy of ‘haiku’ poetry, the psychological density and candour of Max Beckmann’s paintings, and the political clarity of a Heartfield photomontage. Tuymans’ paintings are amalgams of these contrasting sensibilities. Poetry is one pole of his art, investigative journalism is its other limit. The tension between these schismatic territories gives his art its scope.

Funding for this exhibition was generously provided by the Ministry of the Flemish Community, Administration for the Arts.