Luc Tuymans was born in 1958 and grew up in Antwerp where he still lives. The first paintings that he acknowledges are from 1975, even before he started art school in 1976. His early work is informed by a rift traversing his own family, one part of which collaborated with the German occupation while the other part resisted. Pictures have referred to places of Nazi atrocities and evoked their reign of terror, but also exposed more generic scenes of unhomeliness and loss. In later series of works, Tuymans addressed different ideological systems such as colonialism, nationalism or religious belief, but also the empty places of the missing picture.

For a long time Tuymans covered the picture plane in a hesitant, testing way with short brushstrokes – comparable to a man walking on thin ice. This seemingly amateurish way of painting claims a profound lack of mastery. In some of his earlier works such as Gas Chamber, Our New Quarters or Schwarzheide it is obvious that the painting’s lack of mastery transmits the mandatory failure of the picture in the face of its subject. The presented picture states painting’s incapacity to depict. Tuymans has addressed this condition by coining the term “authentic forgery”: every one of his paintings is a forgery insofar it doesn’t create an original and appropriate rendering of its subject but rather the rendering of a pre-existing image (or the absence of an image) that blocks access to what is to be revealed.