Luc Tuymans Lumumba Oil on canvas 24 3/8 x 18 1/8 x 7/8 in. (61.9 x 46 x 2.2 cm) Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Luc Tuymans Photo: courtesy David Zwirner, New York 2000

Experience the work of Belgian contemporary artist Luc Tuymans in his first U.S. retrospective--and the most comprehensive presentation of his art to date.

Jointly organized by the Wexner Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the exhibition spans every phase of the artist’s career and features more than 70 key paintings from 1978 to the present. It premieres at the Wexner Center in September and will then be shown at SFMOMA, before touring to the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels. The retrospective is co-curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (and SFMOMA’s former Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture), and Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum (and former chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center).

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is considered one of the most significant European painters of his generation, and he has been an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. Born and raised in Antwerp, where he lives and works, Tuymans is an inheritor to the vast tradition of Northern European painting and draws on this heritage in his work. At the same time, as a child of the 1950s and 1960s, he is deeply interested in and understandably influenced by photography, television, and cinema. Also interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, he frequently explores issues of history and memory. His distinctive compositions make ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and sequencing, offering fresh perspectives on the medium of painting, as well as larger cultural issues. Tuymans’s paintings might initially suggest relatively innocuous depictions of everyday life, but there is almost always another meaning lurking beneath the surface. The artist’s more recent work addresses the postcolonial situation in the Congo and the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11; these series have led Tuymans to a sustained investigation of the realms of the pathological and the conspiratorial.