Luc Tuymans: Good Luck
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Publish Date: 2020
Texts by Su Wei, Luc Tuymans, and Éric de Chassey
Widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans continues to expand our understanding of the medium. Sourcing imagery from books, magazines, films, the internet, and increasingly his own iPhone photos, Tuymans’s unique selection of subject matter reveals his fascination with moral complexities.
Exploring diverse and sensitive topics, many of which include historic references from World War II to more contemporary events such as 9/11, Tuymans presents imagery that at first seems innocuous or approachable but upon deeper inspection can be entirely unsettling. Achieved through his masterful handling of paint, his works are often suggestive of memories or familiar people, places, and things.
The latest in the Spotlight Series, which focuses on new bodies of work by contemporary artists, Tuymans continues to take on increasingly complex subject matters in his primarily muted palette. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, this book features an essay by art critic Su Wei, who approaches Tuymans’s newest paintings and how they expand his oeuvre.
Details
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artist: Luc Tuymans
Contributors: Éric de Chassey, Su Wei, Spotlight Series
Publication Date: 2020
ISBN: 9781644230336
Retail: $35 | £25 | €34
Status: Out Of Print
Designer: Wkshps
Printer: Asia One, Hong Kong
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 6 ¾ × 9 ½ in | 17.1 × 24.1 cm
Pages: 80
Reproductions: 43 color
Artist and Contributors
Luc Tuymans
One of the most important painters working today, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. The artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of sources and rendered in a restrained palette that belies an underlying moral complexity.
Éric de Chassey
Éric de Chassey is the director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, and a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the director of the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. He has published extensively on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century.
Su Wei
Su Wei is a curator and art critic based in Beijing. He is the senior curator of Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM), Beijing. His curatorial projects include the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012); No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985, Videotage, Hong Kong (2016); Permanent Abstraction: Epiphanies of a Modern Form in Escaped Totalities, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Crescent: Retrospectives of Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu, IOAM, Beijing (2018); and The Lonely Spirit, IOAM, Beijing (2018). His recent work focuses on thick descriptions of China’s contemporary art history, excavating its legitimate origins and rupturing nature.
Spotlight Series
Each title in the Spotlight Series from David Zwirner Books features new work by a leading contemporary artist. Available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions, this series makes the work of these important artists accessible to a wider audience.
$35