Luc Tuymans: Nice

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity.

“Once Tuymans’s muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.” —Jason Farago, The New York Times

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources.

This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasp the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: Good Luck, at David Zwirner, Hong Kong; Eternity, at David Zwirner, Paris; and The Barn, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With texts by the novelist Joshua Cohen, the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.