Suspended - Graphical works - 2015 La Louvière

21-01-2015

Luc Tuymans has worked in other media throughout his career: drawings, oil sketches, film, maquettes, photography, mosaics and printed media. These all play a substantial role in his continuing investigations into how images convey, conceal or subvert meaning. Luc Tuymans’ artworks have always involved the creation of a critical distance towards the original, found image. He creates this distance through the introduction of a time-delay, the insertion of the image into groups of images that together create new and complex conceptual meanings, through carefully chosen, ironic titles and by means of some sort of visual deterioration. 
 
This retrospective of Luc Tuymans’ graphic works – featuring silkscreen prints, lithography, etchings and drawings - shows how every printed medium imparts its own influence. Whereas Tuymans’ paintings are often produced within the timeframe of a single day, printmaking is an arena for experimentation that allows Luc Tuymans to further explore and dismantle the mechanics of image making. 
 
Such a visual deterioration can be achieved through re-photographing an image multiple times with a Polaroid camera or an iPhone, resulting in a washed-out image. It can also be introduced through the processes of printmaking, for example through the separation into colour-layers in screenprinting, which rearticulates the original painting in subtle ways. At the same time, the advantages of multiple print editions allow this Luc Tuymans’ work to be disseminated among wider audiences.
 
This exhibition is therefore a celebration of both the extensive graphic oeuvre of a prolific artist that confirms the relevance of analogue printmaking in contemporary art today.

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