Luc Tuymans ~ When Springtime is Coming ~ at Haus der Kunst

Monday, 24 December 2007 01:39

Munich, Germany - Luc Tuymans (born 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium) examines the issue of power, the machinery behind it, as well as the issue of manipulation and hidden political structures in his paintings. His work emphasizes individual moments in 20th century history : the collaboration between the Flemish National Socialist party and the Germans; the 1942 Wannsee Conference calling for a ’final solution to the Jewish question’; the involvement of the Belgian government in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo; the attack on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001.

For many years other themes, such as childhood, home country and the Belgian form of Catholicism, have also found expression in his works. In the early 1980s Tuymans questioned painting as a contemporary medium and began to produce films. Two years later he started to paint again and even today his painting is characterized by the examination of the moving image and his stylistic devices are those of film and photography: close ups, excerpts and the aesthetic of stills. By means of over and under exposure, Tuymans reduces his motifs to silhouettes and places them in front of empty backgrounds. He lends them a blurriness so that they seem to be the projections of a faded memory. By employing this stylistic device his motifs become mysterious, although they are representational; they persevere in their suggestiveness and intangibility.

Tuymans often uses Polaroids as the basis for his works. For him a Polaroid is much less a photograph than "a liquid in which the image appears". According to the artist, the attractive thing about them is that they are tied to an extreme randomness: "You never know exactly how one is going to develop, whereas with photography you retain at least some control. And it’s precisely this inherent element of loss and possible failure that I value".

In Tuymans’s works the horrific appears in the guise of ordinary constellations. In doing so he often omits the human figure; when it does appear on occasion, its gestures are reduced to the mechanical graphics of a mannequin and the faces resemble masks. In this way the extreme enlargement of a single fingernail, a pair of elbow-length gloves or a series of isolated eyeballs against a tonal background become the appropriate metaphor for existential experiences of fear and violence. After the attack on the World Trade Center, Tuymans showed the everyday in a larger format painting, which he created for documenta 11: His reaction to this event and its flood of media images was an oversized still life with fruit.

When presenting his work, Tuymans questions the connection between the individual work and the exhibition space. Depending on the context, the meaning and effect of the works may shift. Tuymans’s first solo exhibition took place in a swimming pool; the works were hung along the shallow end of the pool into which the viewer had to climb (Palais des Thermes, Ostend 1985).

At the Haus der Kunst Tuymans also places his paintings into a specific context. Shortly after coming to power, Adolf Hitler commissioned Paul Ludwig Troost to design this building. Opened in 1937, the Haus der Kunst was intended to point the way of the future with exhibitions featuring works by contemporary artists representative of ’German art’.

After the building had served as a backdrop for the cultural politics of National Socialism and shortly after the war had ended, a wide public was able to start examining modernism at this very location . In 1955, for instance, a Picasso exhibition was staged at the Haus der Kunst including the painting ’Guernica’. For Tuymans the area of conflict between history and the present creates the external equivalent of the central question: How can paintings exercise power and create specific effects? In the monumental exhibition spaces with their white-green overhead lighting, which the artist has described as ’deceased light’, a parallel can be seen to the artist’s treatment of emptiness and space in his works.

The exhibition’s title relates back to a short text in which the artist examines the effect of his works witin the spatial context: ’When Springtime is Coming. Ideas, questions and remarks on the concept of an exhibition’, a text that appeared in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 2001.

The exhibition at the Haus der Kunst brings together 90 representative works from over 30 years, with the earliest works dating from 1975. Approximately 13 paintings will be shown in Munich only, including ’Les Revenants’. Documentary material is also on view . books, newspaper clippings, catalogues, sketches, Polaroids . providing an insight into the artist’s working methods. In cooperation with the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.

Visit Haus der Kunst at : www.hausderkunst.de