Luc Tuymans (b. 1958)

Exquisitely rendered with delicate brushstokes, Bibs demonstrates Luc Tuymans’ relevance and contribution to the revival of painting in the 1990s. Approaching the traditional medium of painting from a contemporary perspective, Tuymans draws on the cinematic techniques of cropping, close-ups and framing in search of composition. Drawing inspiration from photography, drawings, television stills, and other images from mass media, in 1995 we see Tuymans for the first time extending his source material to his own Polaroid photographs. It was during this year that Tuymans worked on his first major series, Heimat (Homeland) for a solo exhibition held in Antwerp. Including works such as The Flag and Flemish Village the series took inspiration on the iconography of Flemish nationalism, and the way in which national identity is artificially constructed. Drawing attention to the emptiness of many of the contemporary national symbols, which through endless reproduction, have become divorced from their original context. The sense of irony in which he presents these symbols is in some way carried into the present work, where the humours wordplay in the title, meaning ‘ass’ or ‘rump’ in Dutch, questions a simple reading of the image.