The Real Thing: C&TH Meets Artist Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans is telling me about his process. ‘When all the research is done, then I start to work on the paintings. I don’t want to think when I am on the canvas, so to speak. At that point, the intelligence goes from the head to the hands, which is a different intelligence…

‘I also need that specific tension. I’m still very nervous before I start,’ he laughs. ‘That never goes away.’ Tuymans, 67, is one of the world’s most celebrated painters. It seems extraordinary he still suffers a kind of stage fright, but perhaps that is part of his magic.

We are talking amid the installation of two monumental paintings at the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where he was invited to propose new works to hang in place of the basilica’s two Tintorettos, currently undergoing restoration. The resulting paintings, Musicians and Heat, now either side of the basilica’s world famous altar, are his largest works to date.

Tuymans works without interruption, all day, aside from a break for lunch. At the end of the day it’s just as important to leave, too. In the late 70s and 80s, his studio was in the living room of his tiny apartment, and he ruined paintings by ‘overworking’ them, unable to leave them alone. His connection to his work became so intense he famously took a break from painting altogether, making films instead for five years.

Now he has some distance, at least physically. Research – or being assaulted by images – is inescapable with an iPhone to hand. But while modern life may be a cluttered, messy space – with its layers and ‘distortions’ that have obsessed Tuymans for decades – his studio is pristine, ‘antiseptic’ even, he says. In 2006, he started converting a vast wreck in his native Antwerp, and with his architect created a spectacular new life for a former launderette. Light comes from the addition of windows – 28 in total – like cupolas. Pragmatically, it’s an easy place to get a large canvas into a vehicle and out into the world.

Even after almost 20 years the studio has remained pristine, thanks in part to digitising his vast archive. It’s there for him too, as he memorably puts it, to ‘roam through’ when he wants. Like his most famous works that explore the wrongs of history in paint – including negotiating the Holocaust and his own family’s complicated history surrounding it (some family members on his maternal Dutch side joined the resistance, while others on his paternal Flemish side collaborated with the Nazis, a serious discord that left its mark on young Tuymans) – what’s beyond comprehension becomes a source of imaginative obsession. ‘I’m constantly researching for new imagery. And then there’s also imagery I don’t understand – because I don’t understand it, it starts to fascinate me. And I want to completely analyse it. I want to make it, in order to understand it.’ For his show in LA early next year, politics will not be far below the surface, while other new work takes inspiration from the banality of a fruit basket to Géricault’s revolutionary The Raft of the Medusa.

Before we finish, I ask if it’s true that there’s a big market for fakes of his Phaidon book of monographs, published in 2003, in China. ‘I found a hard cover version which doesn’t exist,’ he says with his unexpected big laugh. When he returned for a retrospective in Beijing, this fake was still circulating. Good or bad? ‘They were extremely bad. I mean they were like photocopied versions. But in a sense, exceedingly charming of course.’

All material perhaps for future interrogations of the absurd days in which we live. The feelings his paintings create in people transcend language, and so are sought out around the world. I let him get back to it. Much imitated, and even faked, Tuymans’ work is the real thing.

SEE IT

Luc Tuymans’ paintings are at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice until November 2025.

His solo show opens at David Zwirner, LA, in February 2026. davidzwirner.com