Gray Magic

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 57, Number 2 · February 11, 2010
Gray Magic
By Sanford Schwartz

Luc Tuymans
an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, September
17, 2009–January 3, 2010; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
February 6–May 2, 2010; the Dallas Museum of Art, June 6–September 5,
2010; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 2, 2010–January
9, 2011; and the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, February 10–May 8,
2011.

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Wexner Center for the Arts/DAP, 228
pp., $60.00; $45.00 (paper)


There is a kind of perverse magic to the art of Luc Tuymans. The
Belgian painter, who was born in 1958, has an odd gift for showing the
world in disembodied, not always decipherable, and almost always
ominous ways. He has made pictures of, among many seemingly disparate
things, drops of water, a buttonhole, bloodstains, a child's room, a
man driving a car, and pillows. But he has also taken as subjects
living and dead figures, and events and places, in the public sphere.
Either directly or through inference, he has made paintings of members
of the Nazi high command and the concentration camps, and also Belgian
rule in the Congo. A suite of works from 2005 entitled Proper included
paintings of a black-tie ball, Condoleezza Rice, and a view of a park
as seen from a surveillance camera, while other pictures of his show
aspects of the Oberammergau Passion Play and the Walt Disney Company.

[...]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23594