Luc Tuymans, who was born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, and lives and works in Antwerp, has transformed the territory of painting in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Using photographs and images from film and other media, he tackles a breadth of subjects and motifs, including contemporary politics, cataclysmic historical events, art history, and apparently banal everyday objects and environments, with paintings that are redolent with atmosphere and poetic power.
Installation view of Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket at David Zwirner, New York, 2025 Courtesy David Zwirner
Tuymans’s process of finding the images and deciding how to transform them is slow and precise, and worked through in various stages before it reaches the canvas, where he makes the final piece in oil on a single day. In the resulting pictures, the motif can be veiled or oblique, and sometimes close to abstract, and he has used the term “authentic forgeries” to describe them. In this way, they articulate the elusiveness of representation through painting—a quality Tuymans has described as the medium’s “belatedness”—as well as the subjective nature of experience and memory, both personal and collective.
Installation view of Luc Tuymans at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 2025. Left: Musicians (2025), right: Heat (2025) © Luc Tuymans. All rights reserved. Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner. Photo: Marco Furio Magliani
He discusses the early impact of Piet Mondrian and Léon Spilliaert, his ongoing admiration for Francisco de Goya, and his response to Théodore Gericault and Mark Rothko in recent series of paintings. He reflects on the importance of literature, including the writings of Thomas Pynchon, and film, especially the painterly approach of David Lynch. He gives insight into his studio life and his singular approach to image-making, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
• Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket, David Zwirner New York, until 19 December; David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 24 February-4 April 2026
• Luc Tuymans, Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy, until 22 February 2026
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture platform. Bloomberg Connects offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single click, with new guides being added regularly. They include Es Devlin's exhibition Congregation, which features large-scale chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement from their homelands. This projection-mapped, tiered sculpture is being shown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, or PAC, in New York, until 4 January 2026. Explore more on PAC NYC's guide, available on Bloomberg Connects. You will also find a number of museums across the world that have had major presentations of Luc Tuymans’s work, from, in the UK, Tate and the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in the US, and, in Europe, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and Bozar in Brussels.
