Vice versa

Luc Tuymans - The Secretary of State, 2005, MoMA NY

The first U.S. retrospective of the work of Belgian artist Luc Tuymans —and the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date — is on show at the Dallas Museum of Art June 6 to September 5 after opening at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and then traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Jointly organized by SFMOMA and the Wexner Center, Luc Tuymans spans every phase of the artist's career and features approximately eighty key paintings from 1978 to the present.

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant European figures of his generation, and he has been an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists for his brilliantly enigmatic and deceptively simple figurative paintings. Born and raised in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is an inheritor to the grand tradition of Northern European painting. At the same time, as a child of the postwar media era, his relationship to the painting medium is understandably influenced by photography, television, and cinema.

Luc Tuymans will be organized in chronological order, highlighting the fluid progression of the artist’s work. The retrospective reunites the paintings in groupings originally set out by the artist, thus restoring the intended dialogue among the works. The presentation will also demonstrate that although Tuymans remains loyal to the medium of painting, his tendency to work in suites and at an ever-larger scale have made it imperative to consider him in the light of current installation and site-specific practices.

The retrospective is co-curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (and SFMOMA's former Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture), and Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum (and former chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts). Jeffrey Grove, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, is the coordinating curator of the Dallas presentation of Luc Tuymans. The exhibition concludes its tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is accompanied by a definitive catalogue.