Biography

Luc Tuymans is an influential contemporary Belgian artist. Painting from photographs and films, Tuyman’s works examines cultural memory through a muted palette and choppy brushstrokes, lending the paintings an ambiguous meaning. Tuymans deliberately chooses images of historically significant places or people, as seen in his work Lumumba (2000), a portrait depicting the first Prime Minister of the independent nation of Congo. “If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting,” he has explained. “There is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer.” Born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, he studied fine arts at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels where he first became interested in the work of El Greco. He later attended the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, where he mainly focused on video and film. In the mid-1980s, the artist began painting again, making works which broached the subjects of the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the Belgian Congo. Over the following decades, Tuymans has established himself with numerous solo exhibitions around the world. He currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.