Luc Tuymans is considered one of today’s most influential painters, assuring painting’s enduring legacy by invigorating the medium for a modern context. Born in 1958 in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is steeped in the great tradition of Northern European history painting, as well as a modern culture informed by photography, television, and cinema. This is evident in his canvases, where traditional painting collides with contemporary visual strategies, resulting in compositions that adopt technological methods, such as cropping, sequencing, or the close-up, to introduce new perspectives on painting and culture. His seemingly innocuous pictures are often grounded in previously existing imagery drawn from photographs, found images, film stills, and other contemporary visual artifacts.

Tuymans’s work is held in the collections of several international museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The artist’s first United States retrospective opened to much critical acclaim in 2009 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, travelled on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art and and is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The retrospective concluded in February 2011 at Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium.
Tuymans has been the subject of many solo exhibitions at international institutions, most recently at Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. Other solo exhibitions also include Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw); Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Museu Serralves, Porto; Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Tate Modern, London; and the 2001 Venice Biennale, where Tuymans’s work was presented in the Belgian Pavilion.