Luc Tuymans

Galleri Anders Tornberg, Lund
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1998

Executed in 1998, the title Reuntgen (X-Ray) immediately implies a sense of the memory of the image as the matrix for a memory of reality, a concept which lies at the heart of Luc Tuymans’ oeuvre. Many of his works selectively emphasise or erase visual information and are painted with distortions, contrasts or ambiguity which hints at the semi-disappearance of the image. The present work appears to be a study for the larger work entitled Lungs from the same year which was chosen along with eight other earlier paintings to accompany his new installation of works in the Venice Biennale in 2001. In that celebrated exhibition entitled "Mwana Kitoko" (Beautiful White Man), Tuymans dealt with Belgium’s colonial past in Africa, and particularly, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first Prime Minister, who was assassinated in suspicious circumstances in 1950. This was an event that was being re-investigated fifty years on and the paintings he made resembled fading images, those which were almost lost in time. Alongside this group, the older works all conveyed the idea of the body in different states of presence and withdrawal and the image of lungs presented in an X-ray immediately suggests the idea of being exposed to the mysteries which lie within.