Born in 1958 in Belgium, Luc Tuymans is one of the most important painters of his generation. He is a visual artist best known for his paintings that explore people’s relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it.
World War II is a recurring theme in his work and his canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of sources. His paintings transform material from television, film, and photography into contemplations on history and memory. He taps into a universal social guilt from the Holocaust and Imperialism to child abuse and his paintings seem disturbingly detached. His images have the power to simultaneously communicate and withhold and they are rendered in a palette that suggests a blurry recollection or a fading memory.
This work ”Vilnius” is an image of an analog telephone from a place that had been the Gestapo Headquarters and then those of the KGB. It is now a museum dedicated to the memory of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. Tuymans removes the rotary dial and renders the phone useless leaving in its place a deep green abyss.
Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
