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The Art World in Focus
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Luc Tuymans

LUC TUYMANS

Monkey Business Online Viewing Room David Zwirner 26 February–4 April 2021 Online Only
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Press Release

The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) has long been invested in the relationship between moving and static images. Drawing has been central to Tuymans’s practice from the start, and he has periodically made short animated clips from his paintings and drawings over the course of his decades-long career. As is common in the artist’s practice, the images presented here are rendered equally from history as they are from film stills, magazines, and iPhone photos. Created during the pandemic, these works are further mediated through the lens of the internet and restricted access to the outdoors.

The emblematic, muted qualities of Tuymans’s well-known paintings—a cool detachment, verging on unease—carry into his animations. He presents seemingly innocuous subject matter that, on closer inspection, might reveal a condensed representation rooted in political critique. Tuymans playfully casts his disenchantment in a series of translucent, fuzzy, delineated objects and figures, directing attention back to the medium itself.

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About the Artist

Widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans continues to assert its relevance by addressing a diverse range of topics. Quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling, his works engage equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter cast in unfamiliar and eerie light. Painted from pre-existing imagery, they 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.

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Also Exhibiting at David Zwirner

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About the Gallery
David Zwirner is a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, and currently represents more than eighty artists and estates. The gallery has been home to innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a variety of media and genres. Active in both the primary and secondary markets, David Zwirner has helped foster the careers of some of the most influential artists working today and has maintained long-term representation of a wide-ranging, international group of artists.
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Address
519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street
New York
United States
Opening Hours
Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 6pm
(1)
New York 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street
David Zwirner contemporary art gallery in New York 19th Street United States
David Zwirner
519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York, United States
+1 212 727 2070
http://www.davidzwirner.com

Opening hours
Tuesday – Saturday
10am – 6pm
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