Luc Tuymans was born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium. He lives and works in Antwerp. After completing his art training in Brussels, he studied art history in Antwerp, before embarking on a career as an artist in the mid-1980s. His first, self-organised, solo exhibition took place in the once grand Thermae Palace in Ostend in 1985. Since then, Tuymans has been regarded as one of the most accomplished and sought-after contemporary artists. The series Der diagnostische Blick (‘The Diagnostic Look', 1992) could be described as his international breakthrough, in which he reinterprets painting based on images from a medical handbook, dedicated to a purposeful yet detached expression. Quite the opposite of everything painting often claims to be. The formal characteristics of Tuymans’ work are recognisable here: the soft palette, the horizontal brushstrokes, the blurred and cropped imagery. 

Tuymans has developed a painting technique that clearly draws on the world of film and photography. He uses the Polaroid development process as a model and starting point for his canvases. 

“I paint from the background to the foreground, from blurred to sharp, whilst the paint in the lower layers is still wet. It is only at the end that I work on the contrasts”. 

At the same time, he employs photographic techniques such as cropping, framing and extreme close-ups to cast his figurative compositions, however appealing they may be, in an ominous light. By focusing intensely on a single image, a single thought or a single memory, the subject takes on a distinctive and often frightening dimension. These are never random images; they are always politically or socially charged statements that deliberately freeze their subject.

By using existing photographs as the starting point for his work, Luc Tuymans owes a great deal to the culture and history that he himself questions. To this end, the painter devises the concept of the “authentic forgery”. To escape the controversy surrounding the uniqueness of an image, he creates the artistic freedom to go back in time, reuse existing images and add authentic alienation effects.

“I try to reinterpret images and create a healthy distrust of them, which automatically makes my paintings ambiguous”.

Continue reading here the full biographical text written by Hans Willemse / Lotte Beckwé.