Luc Tuymans · painting never dies
From 10 June to 23 July 2022, David Zwirner presents in Paris "Eternity", an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans.
Source: Galerie David Zwirner · Image: Luc Tuymans, "Eternity", 2021. © Luc Tuymans. Courtesy David Zwirner
Born in Belgium in 1958, Luc Tuymans is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the European figurative painting of the late 20th century, and his works are exhibited in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Modern in London. "Eternity" is Tuymans' 15th exhibition at David Zwirner, but the first time at the gallery's Paris location.
According to David Zwirner, "Tuymans is known for a distinctive style of painting that considers the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, the artist pioneered a decidedly non narrative approach to figurative painting, exploring instead the ways in which information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his works are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or fading memory. Yet, their quiet and restrained appearance belies an underlying moral complexity that engages equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter. Tuymans’s canvases both undermine and reinvent traditional notions of monumentality through their insistence on the ambiguity of meaning."
The gallery also explains that the work that gives the exhibition its name, "Eternity", painted in 2021, "features a spherical form that presents as a luminous field of pure color akin to the compositions of Mark Rothko or Kenneth Noland. However, the dome’s imperfect, pocked surface suggests a real-world referent, in this case the glass dome made by Werner Heisenberg in his laboratory to model hydrogen bomb explosions. A pioneering theoretical physicist, Heisenberg led the German effort to produce atomic weapons during World War II, though it remains unclear whether he helped or hindered this cause. Tuymans has frequently referenced traumatic history in his work; however, the subject of such paintings is not these atrocities themselves but rather the way in which they are integrated into the historical narrative, as well as into collective memory, through images that have the potential to be indeterminate, multivalent, and ultimately revealing of an underlying glimpse of humanity, here literally foregrounding beauty in destruction."
"Eternity" follows other recent exhibitions by Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, such as "Monkey Business" (London, 2021), "20/20" (New York, 2020), or "Good Luck" and "Lìxià" (both in Hong Kong, 2020).

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