This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the new Luc Tuymans exhibition. Go. It’s really great.
Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian painter who creates dreamy yet haunting scenes from source photography as well as his own memories. His work is almost always political—works in the SFMoMA show reference the Holocaust, WWII, the Congolese independence movement, and post-9/11 America—yet the activist messages can be subtle (though sometimes they’re not). You have to dig a little, step back, move forward, or return to a work. But that’s okay—you’ll want to linger.
The painting from the show that is sticking with me the most is the title piece from his Holocaust series Der Architekt (shown above). The painting—a portrait of Hitler’s chief architect, taken from a home movie shot by his wife—shows a man wearing skis, laying prone on the ground after a fall. His face is blank, a ghostly splotch of white paint. The audio guide references Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil,” and that is so fitting here. Absolutely mesmerizing.
The show is up through May 2, 2010.
