Ende

Luc Tuymans accompanies a survey of the Belgian painter's work, gathering paintings built from found and mediated imagery -- news photographs, snapshots, film stills -- rendered in his characteristically pale, drained palette.

Published in 2009, the catalogue traces how Tuymans works from a fixed repertoire of source images to paintings that withhold as much as they show, often circling difficult historical subjects, including Belgian colonial history, without depicting them directly. Essays place the paintings within the artist's method of sketching quickly from a photograph and rarely revising the result.

Tuymans has been a central figure in the return to figurative painting since the 1990s, and this catalogue sits alongside the museum surveys that trace his work from the early history paintings through his later series on politics and media.