Parasol unit luc tuymans biography
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Luc Tuymans
° 1958
Lives in Antwerp (BE), born in Mortsel (BE).
Luc Tuymans was born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium. He lives in Antwerp. After studying painting and art history in Brussels and Antwerp he emerged 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. Tuymans has since made a name for han själv as one of the most accomplished and most sought-after contemporary painters. The series Der diagnostische Blick (‘The Diagnostic Look', 1992) might be called his international breakthrough, with its reinterpretation of the painterly based on images from a medical handbook dedicated to a goal-orientated yet disinterested framtidsperspektiv. Quite the opposite of what painting often claims for itself. We recognise the formal characteristics of Tuymans’s work: the muted palette, the horizontal brushstrokes, the blurred and cropped imagery. In numerous series of painted images Tuymans has address
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Summary of Luc Tuymans
Many artists use art to help make sense of, and process, the world around them. Luc Tuymans has become one of the world's most influential painters in doing just this. His eerie figurative works transform people and events from our global news and cultural feeds into unsettling examinations of history and memory. Social and political events from the world stage become memorialized on his canvas, albeit with a distinct lack of the artist's personal opinion. It's as if he is creating a veil, once removed from the actual event, in order to allow viewers to investigate their own feelings without the pull of direct culpability. His art positions ambiguity as a keystone to our communal existence.
Accomplishments
- Tuymans sources popular media and news imagery, utilizing it to inspire his paintings both in subject matter, and techniques such as close cropping. This allows for instant familiarity for viewers but has also landed him in hot water with regards to be
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Luc Tuymans on His Tormented Relationship With Abstraction, His Views on Geopolitics, and Why His Catholic Upbringing "Doomed" Him
Although he is an accomplished figurative painter, the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has always had a strong abstract element in his work. His paintings, he likes to say, "border on the idea of abstraction." Nonetheless, he has struggled with the artistic approach from time to time. Over the years he’s found abstraction "existential" and "tormented," and has felt "suffocated" by it, as he said in his Phaidon monograph of 2003.
That has not stopped him from curating a show of abstract artists, "The Gap," for the small London gallery Parasol Unit, on the borders of Shoreditch and Islington. The show, which runs through December 6, features 40 works by two generations of Belgian artists in a variety of media. It mingles contemporary abstractionists with historical practitioners of the art—a number of whom were exhibited in the show "G58," hel