Luc Tuymans

The work of the painter Luc Tuymans (1958) is an ongoing investigation of images and the flood of images in which we are immersed on a daily basis; of how people and things appear to us; and of the gap between representation and reality. Because glasses help shape the way someone looks, such an apparently obvious instrument is important to an artist and image researcher. However incidental they may seem to be, glasses help determine how we 'read' a person's identity.
In Glasses, Luc Tuymans and the MAS bring together an exquisite selection of more than twenty works. They include portraits, both of 'nameless people' and of historical figures, and other works, and they have never been seen together before. The selection includes iconic works from Tuymans' oeuvre, whose major themes include Nazism, colonialism and nationalism. In the series Die Zeit, the SS man Heydrich hides his face behind dark glasses, the young Baudouin steps off a plane in Léopoldville concealed by his sunglasses, the laughing American family man Milteer, with eyes wide open behind his glasses, is an extremist and racist, and the face of Flemish author Ernest Claes becomes a kind of blank mask with glasses.