ON&BY Luc Tuymans

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The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is one of the most influential figurative painters working today. Born in 1958 and based in Antwerp, he has exhibited since 1985, with recent retrospectives in Europe and the United States. From the beginning, his work addressed the challenge to painting's legitimacy posed by minimal and conceptual art by taking a sidestep: creating works that seem to have emerged from a preceding era, alienated from their producer. This formal effect of historical distance works in counterpoint with the paintings' often emotionally evocative subject matter, which ranges from the traumatic legacies of postwar Europe to those of postcolonial Africa.Tuymans has also made films, collaborated closely on projects with other artists, and curated group exhibitions of both contemporary and historic art. In all these endeavors, Tuymans investigates the precarious space between documention and depiction of personal and collective memory. This volume collects the artist's statements on his own work as well as his writing on other artists, filmmakers, photographers, philosophers. and writers who have engaged with his thought. The second half of the volume surveys his major bodies of work in texts by leading art historians, critics, theorists and fellow artists. Contributors include Ai Weiwei, Hélène Cixous, Montserrat Albores Gleason, Jean-Paul Jungo, Udo Kittelmann, Joseph Leo Koerner, Brice Marden, Kerry James Marshall, Takashi Murakami, Wim Peeters, Philippe Pirotte, Pablo Sigg