This exhibition is the first retrospective of work by the important contemporary Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. Focussing on Tuymans' drawings, this exhibition will include over ninety works dating from the mid-1970s through the present. Tuymans' uses a variety of traditional and experimental media to convey subtle and often chilling impressions of life in the twentieth-century. This exhibition will explore, in particular, the significant relationship between Tuymans' drawings and his work in film, his affinities with the genres of horror literature and film, and his potent evocations of the lingering reverberations of the Holocaust. The following quotation is from a a recent interview with Tuymans conducted by the exhibition curator Josef Helfenstein. "Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremenedous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void. The observer should become motionless before the picture, freeze. A kind of picture terror. I show pictures with a direct intention. The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that he or she does not experience directly, but from a distance initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level. Something quite unmistakable then triggers certain emotions, makes certain demands,. This can only come about in a certain silence. I mean the silence before the storm. It is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of deja vu." Tuymans is among the most highly regarded contemporary European artists. His work has been shown previously in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Goldie Paley Gallery of the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia; and at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. This is the only American venue for the current exhibition, which originates at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, and travels to the capc Musee d'art contemporain Bordeaux.
