Luc Tuymans: The Arena Edited by Stephan Berg
Texts by Stephen Berg, Konrad Bitterli and Philippe Pirotte
8vo. pp.118. English & German text. profusely illustrated. biography. hardcover (near fine - some light shelf-wear along bottom edge). [Ostfildern-Ruit]: Hatje Cantz, [2003].
ISBN-10: 3775712658 / ISBN-13: 9783775712651
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Since the end of the 1980s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has been developing an extraordinarily complex work, combining the question of representation and representability--inherent in any kind of painting--with a radical charge of pictorial motives. Grounded in a structure that is coolly figurative and drawinglike, and materials that are always preprocessed and mediated (for example, Polaroid shots, newspaper clippings, film stills), Tuymans creates calm, small-format pictures of cropped landscapes, objects, architecture, and seemingly masked people. In their pastel haziness, often primed with white, his pictures evade concrete designation. This book presents a representative selection of Tuymans's works as well as a large group of specially created new works delimited by two central picture motifs: the cycle Die Zeit references the Holocaust, whereas Passion concerns the essence of religious belief.