Luc Tuymans, born in Mortsel in 1958, is a Flemish-Belgian painter. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary Belgian artists, living and working in Antwerp. Tuymans is married to Carla Arocha, a Venezuelan artist.
Having received his artistic education at the Sint-Lukas Institute in Brussels and studying art history at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Tuymans’ paintings are figurative in nature. He employs photographic techniques such as cropping, framing, sequencing, and extreme close-ups. In a time when painting was declared dead, he creates uncomfortable figurative monochromatic canvases, sometimes in muted colors. With a cinematic eye, he depicts seemingly innocent, but in reality loaded subjects: a lampshade (from Buchenwald), a broken doll’s body, a hemline and a leg, a cropped view of a body or a face (from the series Der diagnostische Blick, 1992). Several paintings refer to unresolved past events: the Holocaust (Gaskamer, 1986), Belgian colonialism (Leopard, 2000), and Flemish nationalism.
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