Luc Tuymans is increasingly happy to fire shots at the artworld. Last year he bemoaned that ‘having a network’ was being confused with being a good curator (something which will be tested by his curating of a James Ensor show at the Royal Academy, London, this month). This year he told the Brooklyn Rail that ‘a good painting is a bad painting in a photograph’, a broadside perhaps to the kind of abstraction that is being traded over Instagram. He played on the relationship between the canvas and the lens further with a series of works debuted at Zeno X in September, a show marking 25 years of working with the Antwerp gallery. Insert I, II, III and IV are paintings of iPhone photographs of his own works that Tuymans shot during a 2013 solo show at the Menil Collection, Houston. Lenses of a different kind were a subject of his exhibitions at the Museum aan de Stroom (a homecoming gig) and currently at the National Portrait Gallery, London, featuring as their motif only his works that include spectacles.
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