Luc Tuymans

Description

Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant and influential contemporary artists working today. His work fuses the traditions of old master Flemish and Spanish still-life genre painting with a late 20th century sensibility. His subjects range from major historical events, such as the Holocaust or the politics of the Belgian Congo, to the inconsequential and banal, such as a pillow or a cake. Tuymans has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. This revised edition --the only monograph to span the artist's entire career --has been expanded by 100 pages to include the most of the artist's recent work, with nearly all of Tuymans' paintings reproduced in full-page format.

Ulrich Loock (Survey) is Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where in 1992 he curated Luc Tuymans' exhibition 'Disenchantment'. He is a widely published art critic, concentrating on the critical appreciation of modernism and connected issues and artists. Juan Vicente Aliaga (Interview) is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Valencia, where he lives and works. He is co-editor of the books Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited, 1990) and De amor y rabia. Acerca del arte y el Sida (On Love and Rage. Art and AIDS, 1993). An established curator and art critic, Aliaga writes regularly for Artforum and frieze. Nancy Spector (Focus) is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She has organized exhibitions on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andreas Slominski and Lawrence Weiner as well as Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. Andrei Platonov (Artist's Choice) was born in 1899 in Voronezh, Russia. He worked briefly as a newspaper journalist and an irrigation engineer before devoting himself to writing fiction and poetry by around 1926. Platonov's longest and most ambitious work, Chevengur, partially extracted here, was published posthumously in 1972. Hans Rudolf Reust (Update) is Director of Art at the Hochschule der Kunste in Bern. He regularly writes for Artforum. He has written for numerous journals including Artscribe, Parkett and frieze. Reust has also contributed texts to catalogues on artists including Thomas Schutte and Thomas Struth. In the Artist's Writings, Luc Tuymans discusses the present state of figurative painting and his position within it, and offers insight into his subtle yet compelling imagery.

... Amongst other recently published monographs, the revised and enlarged edition of Phaidon's Luc Tuymans, from its Contemporary Artists Series is opportune as it is just in time for his major show at Tate Modern in the Summer of 2004. Indeed Tate will find it difficult to match the breadth and scale of this book in any exhibition catalogue it may choose to produce. Tuymans is rapidly gaining ground as the successor to Gerhard Richter as the History Painter of the late 20th Century, and this book, which amounts to a catalogue raisonne as nearly every one of his paintings is reproduced, goes some way towards confirming his reputation.'(Andrew Wilson Deputy Editor, Art Monthly, Jan 2004)