About Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian artist who is internationally known for his paintings that engage equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter, frequently cast in unfamiliar and eerie light. Painted from preexisting imagery, his works often appear slightly out of focus and sparsely colored, like third-degree abstractions from reality. Whereas earlier works were based on magazine pictures, drawings, television footage, and Polaroids, recent source images include material accessed online and the artist's own iPhone photos, printed out and sometimes re-photographed several times. Since the 1980s, Tuymans has steadily exhibited in the United States, Europe, and abroad, and his work is represented in major museum collections. Su Wei is a curator and art critic based in Beijing. He is the senior curator of Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM), Beijing. His curatorial projects include the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012); No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985, Videotage, Hong Kong (2016); Permanent Abstraction: Epiphanies of a Modern Form in Escaped Totalities, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Crescent: Retrospectives of Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu, IOAM, Beijing (2018); and The Lonely Spirit, IOAM, Beijing (2018). His recent work focuses on thick descriptions of China's contemporary art history, excavating its legitimate origins and rupturing nature. E´ric de Chassey is the director of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, and a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the E´cole normale supe´rieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the director of the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. He has published extensively on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. His most recent publications include Apre`s la fin: Suspensions et reprises de la peinture dans les anne´es 1960 et 1970 (2017) and L'abstraction avec ou sans raisons (2017). He has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Ligne forme couleur: Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) dans les collections franc, aises (Avignon, 2018); Images en lutte: La culture visuelle de l'extre^me gauche en France (1968-1974) (Paris, 2018); Andrzej Wroblewski: Verso/Reverso (Warsaw, Madrid, 2015); Painting or How to Get Rid of It (Rome, 2014); and Europunk: The Visual Culture of Punk in Europe, 1976-1980 (Rome, Geneva, Charleroi, and Paris, 2010-2013).