PORTO.- The Museu Serralves presents the exhibit Luc Tuymans Dusk/Penumbra through August 15. “Dusk/Penumbra” contains less than 20 works carefully chosen to represent some of the main issues in Luc Tuymans’ oeuvre. These key works are connected to reference material taken from the artist’s personal archive: models he built as a starting point for paintings, objects, books, magazines and polaroids he used for his works, different films, and a slideshow on historic art. The basic idea of this show is to map Tuymans’ field of thinking through the use of objects, images and words. There are discoveries to be made in his early writings, and in his film-projects, where many of his basic concepts were developed. Passage through the rooms of the Casa de Serralves, where Tuymans has installed his second show in Porto since 1998, will provoke a wide range of associations, as do the loose items of source-material published to accompany the exhibition. Curator: Hans Rudolf Reust, Ulrich Loock

Luc Tuymans was born in Mortsel, Belgium in 1958. He studied fine art and painting at the Sint-Lukasinstituut in Brussels (1976-79) and then at the Ecole Nationale Sup-23rieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, also in Brussels (1979-80). He left Brussels for Antwerp, where he studied painting at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1980-82), before returning to Brussels to take a degree in History of Art at the Vrije Universiteit (1982-86).

The first showing of Tuymans's paintings was a solo exhibition at the Palais des Thermes in Ostend in 1985. Since then he has exhibited widely in Europe, with solo shows at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend (1990) and the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (1993). In 1994 his work was included in the London exhibitions Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, at the Hayward Gallery, and The Institute of Cultural Anxiety: Works from the Collection, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was subsequently given a solo exhibition at the ICA in 1995.