Herwig Todts Livres

At the age of nineteen, a young Luc Tuymans saw for the very first time the work of El Greco on a visit to the Szépmvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, an event that sparked his imagination and prompted him to embark on a journey that would lead him to be one of today's most influential artists. Almost forty years later, that life-changing experience is recounted and celebrated in The Image Revisited: Luc Tuymans in conversation with... , a book that acts both as a monograph and a history of art book. Timed to coincide with an exhibition organized by Tuymans at MuHKA, Antwerp, in June 2018, this richly illustrated book includes three conversations Tuymans had with art historians Hans Maria De Wolf, Gottfried Böhm and T.J. Clark in museums in Basel, Brussels and Budapest over the course of three years. What emerges, along with a fascinating discussion on the work of artists such as El Greco, Cézanne, Goya, de la Tour, Titian, Courbet, Mantegna, Hopper, Newman and Richter amongst others, is an insight into Tuymans' own creative process, and how the great art of the past inspired and motivated him.

Widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans continues to expand our understanding of the medium. Sourcing imagery from books, magazines, films, the internet, and increasingly his own iPhone photos, Tuymans’s unique selection of subject matter reveals his fascination with moral complexities. Exploring diverse and sensitive topics, many of which include historic references from World War II to more contemporary events such as 9/11, Tuymans presents imagery that at first seems innocuous or approachable but upon deeper inspection can be entirely unsettling. Achieved through his masterful handling of paint, his works are often suggestive of memories or familiar people, places, and things. The latest in the Spotlight Series, which focuses on new bodies of work by contemporary artists, Tuymans continues to take on increasingly complex subject matters in his primarily muted palette. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, this book features an essay by art critic Su Wei, who approaches Tuymans’s newest paintings and how they expand his oeuvre.