Luc Tuymans
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. 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.
If you own a work by Luc Tuymans
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