The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b.1958) has been at the forefront of the re-energising of painting over the past fifteen years, creating a varied and remarkable body of work. Realising it was impossible to create anything entirely new in painting, Tuymans came up with the idea of the 'authentic forgery'. Using a restricted palette of bleached-out colours and giving his paintings an apparently aged, cracked appearance, he imbues everyday objects with a sense of impending menace, hinting at the terrors that lurk beneath the surface.
Tuymans's work often deals with complex aspects of history, from Christ's Passion to the Holocaust, from child abuse to the legacy of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. The enigmatic scenes he depicts invite the viewer to construct their own narrative. Tuymans has been described by the critic Dominic van den Boogerd as 'the Polanski of contemporary painting ... looking through the lens that isolates him from a terrible world which is entirely his own.' Fully illustrated throughout in colour and with insightful and accessible texts on his work, this book is an essential reference to the career of one of the most important painters working in Europe today.