2022
At his first solo show in David Zwirner's Parisian gallery, Luc Tuymans shows new works on polarization. The largest canvas, Eternity, refers to early studies of nuclear explosions.
At his previous gallery exhibition, in 2021 at Zeno X, Luc Tuymans showed large paintings entitled Numbers. They referred to the statistics and alarming figures in intensive care, which we were bombarded with daily during the pandemic.
Eternity starts from what came next: crisis, polarization and war. For example, there are four works on voting behavior in the US House of Representatives, where the dots show that Republicans and Democrats are less and less alike.
The central work Eternity, also the title of the solo, evokes the moment before the nuclear bomb explodes. The sculpture is based on a model, a glass vessel in which the German physicist Werner Heisenberg simulated a hydrogen bomb in his laboratory in the 1930s. Tuymans enlarged the spherical, luminous shape and treated it as a field of pure color à la Rothko.