David Zwirner is pleased to announce Luc Tuymans: Monkey Business, a presentation of new works on paper and an animation by the Belgian artist on view in The Upper Room at the gallery's London location. This follows on an eponymous presentation of recent works on David Zwirner Online, organised on the occasion of FIAC 2021.
Created during the pandemic—particularly during the early days when much of the world was under strict quarantine orders and Tuymans was, for a period, unable to access his studio—these works mine the vast store of images that the artist has collected over the past decades. While some make reference to previous paintings, others present ideas for compositions to be realised later, while still others are looser, allowing the artist to experiment with technique.
Long interested in the relationship between moving and static images, Tuymans has periodically made short animated clips from his paintings and drawings. The multiple layers of representation featured in these works direct attention back to the medium and the exercise of painting itself, thus creating a trompe l'oeil effect in which all media appear simulated, while also exaggerating their technical differences. A new animation, Monkeys will be on view as part of this presentation alongside a number of the original drawings used to create it.
In the animation, two monkeys, one of which recalls a favoured mechanical toy from Tuymans's own childhood, materialise. Their painterly forms flicker in and out of focus, and are ultimately set ablaze at the end of the clip. The artist has long been fascinated by the human qualities of monkeys, and this sequence of events recalls a film that he made in the early 1980s. Rendered here on transparent polyester tracing paper used by commercial animators, this subject matter allowed Tuymans to revisit the imagery through the lens of painting.
Tuymans is known for his distinctive style of painting that demonstrates the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered a decidedly non-narrative approach to figurative painting, instead exploring how information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his works are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or a fading memory. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity. They engage equally with questions of history and its representation as they do with quotidian subject matter.
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.
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.
