Wild About Luc

(Photo: © Grant Delin / Courtesy David Zwirner, New York)

Don't know who Luc Tuymans is? Get to know him. A flurry of national media is coming out about the artist, whose paintings will fill the Wex galleries this fall in the premiere venue of his first U.S. retrospective. In the September issue of ELLE magazine, the "ELLE 25" list of "essential happenings everyone will be talking about this fall" includes our Luc Tuymans show. "Tuymans' work is proof that only paintings, in a time teeming with explicit photographs and films of war and terror, expose darker reality," writes senior editor Miranda Purves, who quotes Wex Director Sherri Geldin: "These are works of ravishing psychological and visual force." And in ELLE's sister publication, Elle Décor (in its September issue), an extended caption notes that Tuymans "has reinvigorated representational painting." In Artforum's fall preview, writer Jordan Kantor writes, "After almost twenty-five years of mature production, Luc Tuymans's reputation precedes him, and the contours of his artistic accomplishment are finally coming into focus… .As large as Tuymans looms in contemporary painting conversations, however, this seventy-work retrospective….is his first substantial American showing, but it promises to make up for lost time with unprecedented depth." And J.S. Marcus of the Wall Street Journal summed it all up earlier this summer, noting that with this forthcoming full-scale retrospective and tour, and a smaller European show, Tuymans is having "a banner year." The retrospective, which opens here September 17, will tour to San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels.