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1/10/2010

Luc Tuymans

Museum of Contemporary Art MCA, Chicago

Luc Tuymans (Belgian, b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant European painters of his generation and he has been an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. Born and raised in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is an inheritor to the vast tradition of Northern European painting. At the same time, as a child of the 1950s, his relationship to the medium is understandably influenced by photography, television, and cinema.

Interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, as well as the relationship between photography and painting, using a muted palette to create canvases that are simultaneously withholding and disarmingly stark. Drawing on imagery from photography, television, and film, his distinctive compositions make ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and Luc Tuymans sequencing, offering fresh perspectives on the medium of painting, as well as larger cultural issues.

The artist's more recent work approaches the post-colonial situation in the Congo and the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11. These series have led Tuymans to a sustained investigation of the realms of the pathological and the conspiratorial.

Luc Tuymans is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Wexner Center for the Arts. It is organized in chronological order, highlighting the fluid progression of the artist's work and spanning every phase of the artist's career. It features approximately 80 key paintings from 1985 to the present and is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue.

Luc Tuymans is cocurated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the MCA Chicago, and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The MCA Chicago presentation is coordinated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Related Programs:

Film Series Curated by Luc Tuymans
November 27-December 12, 2010

Long influenced by cinema, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans gave up painting, for a brief time in the early 1980s, to become an experimental filmmaker. The effects of working with film became paramount to his approach to painting. "It laid the basis for a different way of looking. Montage, the movement of image, the close-up -- they have all been very important for my work," he said. Curated by Tuymans and presented in conjunction with the exhibition Luc Tuymans, this series features films that resonate with the artist's interests and his paintings.

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Tim Louis Graham
October 2 - 31, 2010

This show titled {...} (2010) consists of four 6 x 6 foot chain-link fencing panels that connect to form a minimalist cube, or what the artist calls a cage-like structure. The artist dismantled the cage by cutting the chain-link into small pieces, allowing them to fall to the floor in the center and at the outer edges of the cube. In discussing the work (titled Counter-Clockwise - an allusion to the direction taken in dismantling the chain-link) Graham emphasizes the performative time element that remains present, as viewers interact with the sculpture and gradually come to comprehend the process that has transpired.

The installation also includes an archival film still of Conrad Schumann defecting from East Germany in 1961. The printed still depicts Schumann jumping over the barbed wire which constituted the Berlin Wall in its third day of construction. Graham questions the associations of freedom and escape generally attributed to these iconic images by asking us to consider the life-narrative that extends beyond the historical moment represented in the photographs.

Schumann had ambiguous feelings about his defection and eventually committed suicide. In pairing the archival photographs with the sculpture, Graham overtly addresses such themes as confinement, escape, time, and the non-linearity of historical and personal narratives. Tim Louis Graham is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute.


Image: Orchid, 1998; oil on canvas; 39 1/4 x 30 1/4 in. (99.7 x 76.8 cm); Private collection, New York. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York; © Luc Tuymans; photo by Ben Blackwell; courtesy David Zwirner, New York

Media Relations
Erin Baldwin 312.397.3828, ebaldwin@mcachicago.org
Karla Loring 312.397.3834, kloring@mcachicago.org

Opening October 2nd

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
Museum Hours:
Monday Closed
Tuesday 10 am - 8 pm
Wednesday through Sunday 10 am - 5 pm
Admission
Suggested General Admission $12
Students with ID and Senior Citizens $ 7
MCA Members, members of the military, and children 12 and under (must be accompanied by an adult) Free
Admission is free all day on Tuesdays year round.

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