Curated by Emma Dexter
Luc Tuymans has been everyone’s favorite candidate for serious European painter for several years now. Far away from the American brand of ostentatious figuration, Tuymans draws on Raoul de Keyser for minimalist eccentricity and Richter for a mournful commentary on painting itself. Tate senior curator Emma Dexter brings together eighty works from the past twenty years for the artist’s first major exhibition in the UK. Tuymans’s seemingly impersonal combination of weighty topics (ranging from the Congo to the Holocaust); the faint affect of found photographs (on which his work is often based); and lovely, offhand handling produces an indelible sadness—a history of absence, lost changes, and missing links.
Travels to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Oct. 16–Jan. 23, 2005.
