“This 3D-collaged digital print depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple, an image only privy to the eyes of church members, and produced by Tuymans after a photograph of the space from a surveillance camera. Challenging the perceptual process with his sublime works, Tuymans responds to the ethically fraught associations with marriage in religious sects by undermining the covert and exclusive treatment of this area and exposes the omnipresence of surveillance all the while maintaining mystery with the dream-like quality of his seemingly somnambulant scenes. Discreet yet unsettling, this print highlights the gaping magnitude of impotence and passive spectatorship only once the cognitive references are clear, paradoxically encouraging a passive escapism on a purely visual level.” – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp

Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is considered one of the most influential painters of his generation. With his muted palette, limited to pale pastel shades with a frequent brown or grey undertone, Tuymans creates small-format pictures of everyday objects, architecture, cropped landscapes and frequently, also mask-like people. By employing this blurry and choppy painting technique, the artist renders pre-existing images from photographs, film and television, of historically charged subject matter. Interested in the mediation and translation of images through mass media, Luc Tuymans often investigates cultural memory of historical events that have had a major impact on human action and thought, such as the two world wars, Belgian colonialism, and 9/11. The Belgian’s artworks are featured in museum collections worldwide, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London. Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel, near Antwerp, in 1958.

Luc Tuymans, Altar