Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?
Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?
Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe?

Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? Luc Tuymans with essays by Pablo Sigg and Gerrit Vermeiren

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Beginning with 'Gilles de Binche' (Antwerp, 2005) and concluding with 'Against the Day' (Brussels, Moscow and Malmö, 2009-10), acclaimed painter Luc Tuymans produced a landmark suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work. Their meta-narrative, which traces the philosophical and psychic roots of contemporary civilization, weaves together a range of photographic source images, from St Peter’s to Disneyland to Big Brother, that together tell the banal and terrifying story of our times.

Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? features this source imagery alongside more than 100 of the artist's newest paintings, many never before published. Accompanying each body of work is an introductory text written by the artist, while the essay 'Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz’, specially commissioned by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg, provides historical and philosophical context. ‘Proper’, an essay by Belgian art historian Gerrit Vermeiren, looks at one body of work in detail, tracing the themes and sources of each painting and capturing the cultural atmosphere of the moment in which they were produced. And an extensive interview between Tuymans and his assistant Tommy Simoens offers additional insight into the artist’s thinking and motivations.

Celebrated as one of the world's most gifted and visionary painters, Tuymans has been creating iconic works of contemporary painting for nearly three decades. With their enigmatic compositions and modulated colours, these works are moving and unmistakable, and their power continues to win new converts to Tuymans’s chilling vision of history painting. Specifications:

  • Format: Hardback
  • Size: 290 x 250 mm (11 3/8 x 9 7/8 in)
  • Pages: 224 pp
  • Illustrations: 180 illustrations
  • ISBN: 9780714856032

Luc Tuymans has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including Tate Modern, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lives in Antwerp.

Pablo Sigg is an artist and writer based in Mexico City.

Gerrit Vermeiren is an artist, art historian and writer based in Antwerp. His books include Luc Tuymans: I Don't Get It.

"Seasonal reading... Amongst other recently published monographs, the revised and enlarged edition of Phaidon's Luc Tuymans, from its Contemporary Artists Series is opportune as it is just in time for his major show at Tate Modern in the Summer of 2004. Indeed Tate will find it difficult to match the breadth and scale of this book in any exhibition catalogue it may choose to produce. Tuymans is rapidly gaining ground as the successor to Gerhard Richter as the History Painter of the late 20th Century, and this book, which amounts to a catalogue raisonne as nearly every one of his paintings is reproduced, goes some way towards confirming his reputation."—Art Monthly

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