is one of the most important painters of his generation. His first major museum presentations were held in 1990 at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. In 1992, the artist participated in Documenta IX in Kassel, in addition to having a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, which helped cement his growing reputation in Europe. In 1994,

 debuted at Portikus, Frankfurt, and traveled to David Zwirner, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, establishing him as a major influential artist abroad. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp.

One of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, Tuymans has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery since joining its roster in 1994. In May 2023, David Zwirner presented 

, a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s work, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. This was the artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the United States since 2016. Previous shows at David Zwirner include 

Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings

Tuymans has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide. An in-situ temporary mural by the artist, 

, will be on view at the Rotunda Valentin de Boulogne in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, starting on May 22, 2024. In November 2024, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, will present 

, a major exhibition of the artist's work. Other solo presentations include those held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2019); Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2016), which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and Tate Modern, London (2004), which traveled to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The artist has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Honor, International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP), Porto, Portugal (2019); the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich (2000); and the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts (1993). His works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom.

Tuymans’s catalogue raisonné of paintings, from 1972 to 2018, is available from David Zwirner Books and Yale University Press. The three volumes feature full-color images and documentation of more than five hundred paintings.

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Eva Meyer-Hermann is a German art historian who has worked for international museums and major private collections for over twenty-five years. She was formerly a curator at the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld, and was later director of the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg. Afterwards, she was both director and curator of two private art collections in Switzerland, before becoming senior curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Since 2006, she has been an independent curator and writer.

Eva Meyer-Hermann

Over the course of four decades, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has created his own distinctive vernacular, a new visual vocabulary. The second volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, including some of his most iconic canvases.

Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled 

, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from 

, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, 

 (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1995–2006

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2 | Books

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.