The third volume of a catalogue raisonné of Luc Tuymans’s paintings, surveying nearly two hundred works, charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology. Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice and are typically painted from preexisting imagery that includes photographs and video stills. The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The Internet, in particular, is central to these works as well as the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings. This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) has, over the course of his remarkable career, created a distinctive vernacular, and is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. This second volume in a planned three-volume catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, featuring some of his most iconic canvases, including from his seminal exhibition Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000), derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and The Secretary of State (2005), a portrayal of Condoleeza Rice which conjures the history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States. Brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period are accompanied by an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the works in the volume. This catalogue raisonné is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world.

Luc Tuymans is one of todays most widely admired painters, an heir to the great tradition of Northern European painting and an enduring influence on younger and emerging artists. As a European child of the 1950s, his relationship to painting is inevitably structured by television, cinema and by the lingering effects ofWorldWar II; more recent historical preoccupations have included the dramatic turn of world events post-9/11. Tuymans combines a muted palette with deteriorated surface effect and a singular use of cropping, close-up and sequencing perfect devices with which to undertake his investigation of the pathological, the banal and the conspiratorial. Published in conjunction with the artists first full-scale American survey, this is without question the authoritative publication on Tuymans. It features approximately 80 key works from 1985 to the present, and is accompanied by essays analysing the painters main concerns, with particular attention paid to his working process and his adaptation of source materials. Exhibition co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn shows that although Tuymans remains loyal to painting as a medium, his tendency to work in suites, and at an increasing scale, also relates his work to current installation and site-specific art. Co-curator Helen Molesworth examines themes of sinister banality, Joseph Leo Koerner writes on iconophobia and iconophilia, Ian Buruma addresses political aspects of Tuymanss work and his relationship to photography, and Bill Horrigan examines cinematic sources. This book is not only the most comprehensive survey of Tuymans's career to date, but also the most thorough chronology of his artistic development.

Beginning with 'Gilles de Binche' (Antwerp, 2005) and concluding with 'Against the Day' (Brussels, Moscow and Malmo, 2009-10), acclaimed painter Luc Tuymans produced a landmark suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work. Their meta-narrative, which traces the philosophical and psychic roots of contemporary civilization, weaves together a range of photographic source images, from St Peter's to Disneyland to Big Brother, that together tell the banal and terrifying story of our times. Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? features this source imagery alongside more than 100 of the artist's newest paintings, many never before published. Accompanying each body of work is an introductory text written by the artist, while the essay 'Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz', specially commissioned by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg, provides historical and philosophical context. 'Proper', an essay by Belgian art historian Gerrit Vermeiren, looks at one body of work in detail, tracing the themes and sources of each painting and capturing the cultural atmosphere of the moment in which they were produced. And an extensive interview between Tuymans and his assistant Tommy Simoens offers additional insight into the artist's thinking and motivations. Celebrated as one of the world's most gifted and visionary painters, Tuymans has been creating iconic works of contemporary painting for nearly three decades. With their enigmatic compositions and modulated colours, these works are moving and unmistakable, and their power continues to win new converts to Tuymans's chilling vision of history painting.

In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, Social Forms illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises. In Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810–1820) to David Hammons’s In the Hood (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s Guernica and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with. Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, Social Forms delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.