Luc Tuymans

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Described by art critic Adrian Searle as "a Belgian with attitude, probably the most influential figurative painter working now," Luc Tuymans is also the most significant Belgian artist since Magritte.

Born and trained in Antwerp (although he failed to graduate from the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts), Tuymans continues to live and work in his home city, the latest in an illustrious lineage of painters stretching back to Peter Paul Rubens who have made the Flemish port their home.

Tuymans is influenced and inspired by history and art history, yet his highly conceptual work addresses the place of art, and the inadequacies of painting in particular, in an information age in which it has been eclipsed by photography, film and television as a medium for conveying information.

His work is influenced by cinematographic techniques such as cropping and framing -- Tuymans even gave up painting to become a filmmaker for a period in the early 80s.

Recent exhibitions have addressed large and controversial themes including the Holocaust, 9/11 and the legacy of Belgian colonialism yet always tangentially through the use of oblique and sometimes wilfully opaque imagery.

In other works, Tuymans uses his fragile brushstrokes, and anemic colors to convey abstract emotions, never spending more than a day on a single work.

The theme of his most recent New York exhibition, "Proper," was "fragile America and the crumbling state of current affairs" and featured an ambiguous portrait study of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The New York Times describes his style as "postmodern romanticism ... seductive and sinister, nondescript and suggestive."

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