Luc has Legs

The Luc Tuymansexhibition, on view at the Wex in the fall and now on view through May 2 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, continues to garner national media coverage. Most recently, Tuymans and this exhibition was featured in the Sunday, February 7 issue of the New York Times, in a piece written by Dorothy Spears, who was here for the opening in September (read the full text here). In addition, The New York Review of Booksreviewed the show and the exhibition catalogue in its February 11 issue, noting, “At his most engaging, he is a purely visual artist whose work is about the act of looking and then deciphering, or not deciphering, what we see. His best paintings transfix us with their muted paint surfaces and hazily bleached-out light. Yet he is also an artist who sees political undercurrents everywhere and needs to incorporate in his pictures his convictions and questions about the world we live in.” Read the full text here. The current (February) issue of Art in America has an extensive interview with Tuymans and a look back at the Wex exhibition, as well as Tuymans's conversation here with art historian T.J. Clark.Artforum wrote it up in January: “Now midcareer, the fifty-one-year-old Belgian has recently been the subject of several international survey exhibitions, each presenting a slightly different picture of the artist. While some emphasized his strategic range and others his poetic formalism, the latest iteration, which opened last September at the Wexner Center for the Arts, privileges Tuymans's engagement with (often incendiary) historical subject matter.” And in the fall, revered art critic Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker reviewed the show and Tuymans's “amazingly intoxicating brew,” giving it a “thumbs-up.” After San Francisco, the exhibition travels to Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels. More coverage to come, we're sure.