Luc Tuymans valuation
Paints from photographs and film stills, small, pale and fast, about things that are hard to look at.
Luc Tuymans was born at Mortsel in Belgium in 1958, spent years making film before returning to painting, and works from a rule of his own: each canvas is painted in a single day, from a photograph, a film still, a Polaroid or a television image, in a drained, chalky palette that looks bleached.
What a work by Luc Tuymans is worth
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Bio
Luc Tuymans was born at Mortsel in Belgium in 1958, spent years making film before returning to painting, and works from a rule of his own: each canvas is painted in a single day, from a photograph, a film still, a Polaroid or a television image, in a drained, chalky palette that looks bleached. The subjects are frequently historical and difficult — the Holocaust, Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, the Jesuits, American power after 2001 — approached obliquely, so the picture is of a lampshade or a wallpaper pattern rather than of the event.
Tuymans is central to the revival of European painting since the 1990s and the market reflects that, with institutional demand strong. Paintings are unique and are led by subject and by series as much as by size. The one-day method produces thin, matt, unvarnished surfaces on which any retouching is visible, and the pale palette shows dirt and handling immediately, so condition assessment is important. Works on paper and a modest print output exist. A Belgian court found in 2015 that one painting infringed a photographer's copyright.
Sint-Lukas, Superstition and Mwana Kitoko
Tuymans studied at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels from 1976 to 1979 and gave up painting for film between 1980 and 1985. His first North American exhibition, Superstition, was at David Zwirner in New York in 1994, and Heimat, at Zeno X in Antwerp in 1995, answered the rise of Flemish nationalism.
Mwana Kitoko, paintings drawn from King Baudouin's state visit to the Congo in the 1950s, was shown at David Zwirner in 2000 and in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. At Documenta 11 in 2002 he showed a single still life on a huge scale.
Zundert, Gaskamer and the catalogue raisonné
Tuymans's father was Flemish and his mother Dutch. During the war her family hid refugees with the Dutch Resistance, while some on his father's side were said to have sympathised with the Nazis, and the questions that raised became a lasting subject. As a boy he won a drawing competition on holiday at Zundert, and at eight or nine saw a Mondrian at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague, which he calls his first experience of art. After Sint-Lukas he studied at La Cambre and the Antwerp academy, then art history at the Free University of Brussels from 1982 to 1986, and with Marc Schepers collected family photographs from an Antwerp neighbourhood for the project Morguen.
Gaskamer, of 1986, is a small painting of the gas chamber at Dachau made from a watercolour done on the spot. Die Zeit, of 1988, puts a portrait of Reinhard Heydrich among its four panels, Der diagnostische Blick, of 1992, is ten paintings taken from a physician's manual, and Heritage, shown at David Zwirner in 1996, answered the mood in America after the Oklahoma City bombing. Each painting is preceded by drawings, photocopies and watercolours, and the blur is painted rather than wiped. The catalogue raisonné records nearly two hundred paintings up to 1994, and Tate Modern gave him a solo exhibition in 2004.
Best auction results
- Rumour $2.7m
- Oil on canvas, 2001 · New York · 15 May 2013
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
