Luc Tuymans in Conversation

Writing in The New Yorker about Tuymans’s first retrospective, Peter Schjeldahl described the artist as “the most challenging painter in the recent history of art.” What Tuymans challenges is a long, post-Abstract Expressionism debate about the relevancy f painting itself, which some have called a tired art form unable to compete with mass media and industrial production. In Tuymans’s hands, painting relinquishes bravura yet speaks again, often taking up the most difficult of subjects, from the Holocaust to the colonial legacy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Bush administration’s war on terror. Here, Tuymans speaks about his own work and is joined in conversation by exhibition co-curator Molesworth. A book signing follows.