Luc Tuymans - Contemporary Art London Thursday, June 21, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, Private collection, New York; Saatchi Collection, London

  • Exhibited

    London, The Saatchi Gallery, The Triumph of Painting, January 26 – July 3, 2005

  • Catalogue Essay

    Taken from movies, pictures or drawings, Luc Tuymans’ paintings are always based on the idea of a pre-existing image – an image that through his painterly process becomes loaded with a sense of estrangement and often ambiguity. Subject-matters that are derived from history or social environments, Tuymans’ compositions are painted with a distinct colour pallet of light hues, providing the canvas with a certain glow.

    Ceiling from 1989/93 is a painting embracing the typical characteristics of Tuymans artistic oeuvre. With its light colours and jagged linear forms, this work is detached from ant specific location. Like with many of the artist’s paintings, the concept of reinterpretation is demanded by the work – a work that in its innocent subject matter becomes the subject of interpretation. With its hidden significance, this work is in fact charged with meaning, yet never allowing the spectator to decipher it.

    “In Ceiling, Tuyman's cropped image of rafters is rendered as contradiction, suggesting both the clinical abstraction of formalist painting, and something recognizably and intimately familiar. It's this duplicity of illusion which is at the heart of Tuymans’ work: scenes fragmented and removed from context never quite shed their 'aura'. Presented with a cool and detached beauty, Tuymans’ paintings are as ephemeral as ghosts; seeming to be forever haunted from within.” (taken from http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tuymans_Ceiling.htm, 2005)

60

Ceiling

1989/1993
Oil on canvas.
11 7/8 x 19 3/4 in. (30.2 x 50.2 cm).
Signed and dated twice “Luc Tuymans 89' and 'Luc Tuymans '93” on the reverse.

Estimate
£80,000 - 120,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art

22 June 2007, 4pm & 5pm
London