David Zwirner presents: Luc Tuymans

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by renowned Belgian artist Luc Tuymans at the gallery’s Hong Kong location—his first solo presentation in Greater China. On view will be a selection of recent paintings and a new single-channel animated video that is drawn from a range of historical and contemporary images. Together, the works share an undercurrent, as suggested by the exhibition’s title, of paradox and uncertainty.

Tuymans has become known for a distinctive style of painting that demonstrates the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered a decidedly non-narrative approach to figurative painting, exploring how information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers instead. His works are rendered in a muted palette; their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity, and they engage equally with questions of history and its representation as they do with the quotidian subject matter. Tuymans’s canvases both undermine and reinvent traditional notions of monumentality through their insistence on the ambiguity of meaning.