Luc Tuymans
Ein Raum für Bremerhaven
18.11.2012

Since the 1980s, the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has produced a body of work that can be seen as one of the most important contributions to contemporary art. The central medium of his artistic practice is painting, to which he has given new impulses through a special, very restrained color palette and an unmistakable style. Many of his works, in which he deals with traumatic topics such as the Holocaust, as well as with colonial policy in Belgian Congo or the events surrounding September 11, 2001, appear washed out or faded. Tuymans’ special aesthetic, which gives the Belgian’s paintings the character of vague or blurred memories, has had a lasting influence on an entire generation of younger artists and contributed significantly to the discourse on new forms of painting that began in the early 2000s.
Parallel to his paintings, he has been producing a multi-layered printmaking work since the late 1980s. The presentation at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven will be the first time that it will be presented to a wider public. The range of media used by Tuymans, and thus also represented in the exhibition, extends from screen printing to etching and lithography and is thus extremely diverse. The themes that are dealt with in these prints are usually closely related to the content dealt with in Tuymans’ other works, so that the Bremerhaven show not only provides an overview of the artist’s prints, but also gives a general impression of his work. Tuymans’ editions are not reproductions, however. In the course of transferring his motifs to the medium of prints, he gives them their own presence through a wide variety of modifications, so that they are in no way inferior to paintings and can be seen as an essential, if still largely unknown, part of the Belgian’s artistic work. The presentation of Tuymans’ prints at the Bremerhaven exhibition will be an impressive and fascinating treasure that will undoubtedly become a permanent fixture in the international exhibition scene in the coming years.
The presentation at the Kunsthalle follows on from Luc Tuymans’ exhibitions at Bremerhaven’s “Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst”, where he presented a selection of paintings in 1993, right at the beginning of his career, and created a large-scale mural in 2007. The artist’s special connection to Bremerhaven is now also reflected in the Kunstmuseum. At the same time as the exhibition at the Kunsthalle, a room with works from the Kunstverein’s collection will be inaugurated on November 18.
Luc Tuymans, born in Mortsel, Belgium in 1958, is one of the most important artists of our time. His works can be found in the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. In 2003, Tuymans represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale. From 2007 to 2010, the artist’s oeuvre was the subject of extensive retrospectives that toured Europe and America.