A pivotal artist in the field of contemporary painting, Luc Tuymans has shown extensively in Europe and the United States. In 2004, Tuymans’ work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, which traveled to the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany. The Wexner Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will mount the artist’s first US retrospective in 2008.

This exhibition will include 10 new paintings, in which Tuymans puts forth the image of a fragile America and the crumbling state of current affairs. There is a sense of delayed trauma, depicted in flat, muted hues, that shuns the obvious and circumvents easy interpretation. With a similar intensity to the exhibitions Mwana Kitoko, 2000, in which he examined the colonial history of Belgium, and Fortune, 2003, which centered on the effects of images from 9/11, Tuymans offers a critique of America that is intended to be subconsciously constructed. While there is nothing overt or merely symbolic about these paintings, they lay claim to real events, suppressed memories, and, in this case, the reality of our current political dilemma.

Incited by war-time musical films from the 1940s, the central concept of the exhibition is a state of confusion derived from inconclusive memories and the dissolution of the familiar. In musicals, the subsequent chaos that is created by dancing (even when carefully choreographed) creates constant, yet dislocated, visual confrontation.