Luc Tuymans, Smiley (2022), via David Zwirner
Open this month at David Zwirner Gallery’s  537 West 20th Street location in New York, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans presents a selection of new works that marks his seventeenth show with the gallery. Mining a hazy, liminal technique that results in works that defy easy categorization, Tuymans continues the exploration of the act of seeing, and reflecting that image in his work.Â
Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity that engages equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter. Tuymans has in recent years increasingly turned to the internet for visual material, cannily selecting images—often re-photographing them with his iPhone before translating them onto canvas—that straddle the mundane and the profound, thereby continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world. Titled The Barn, the current show is conceived by Tuymans as the third in a trilogy of exhibitions of his work at David Zwirner. Referencing a disparate range of source imagery, the canvases in the exhibition are painted with heightened contrast and intense color than the artist’s work heretofore, thereby addressing an ascendant sense of socio-political uncertainty with a newfound clarity and urgency.
Luc Tuymans, The Barn (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Luc Tuymans, Bob (2022), via David Zwirner
The exhibition takes its title, The Barn, from a painting of the same name, which is based on an image the artist came across on YouTube and subsequently photographed, as is made evident by the iPhone photo roll shown along the bottom edge of the composition. Painted in vibrant hues, the bucolic scene of plentitude ostensibly masks an undercurrent of emptiness and cruelty. Another key painting in the exhibition refers to an image from the 1980s of populist television personality Bob Ross on set for an episode of his educational broadcast show “The Joy of Painting.†Ross is shown under bright television lights, his signature hairstyle shown in profile, palette in hand and surrounded by camera equipment, which Tuymans has rendered in abstract, stark forms that emphasize the artificiality of the scene. Smiley (2022) presents a hot air balloon with a generic smiley face depicted on its surface, hovering ominously in an otherwise empty, hazy sky; the smear of Tuymans’s iPhone lens is markedly visible in the composition. Also on view is Abe (2022), which reads as a hollow skull, but, in fact, actually depicts a blurred close-up of the face of the animatronic representation of Abraham Lincoln from the stage show “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln†that has been presented at Disneyland since the 1960s. Here, the visage of the 16th US president (and, by implication, all that he symbolically represents) is shown as a degraded, unrecognizable specter, while also pointing to Tuymans’s past works based on the darker undercurrents of Walt Disney’s legacy.
Throughout, Tuymans plays with the act of presentation and representation, using his modes of processed and digested media as a way to explore and reposition the image’s relation to its original. The show closes July 21st.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner [Exhibition Site]
