Luc Tuymans - Allo!
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Luc Tuymans, which will inaugurate the gallery’s first European location on 24 Grafton Street in Mayfair, London. The Belgian artist joined David Zwirner in 1994 and this marks his ninth solo show with the gallery and the first in London since his 2004 retrospective at the Tate Modern. Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. The present exhibition comprises a series of paintings entitled Allo! While an initial source of inspiration was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the visual reference for the works was the final scene in the 1942 film The Moon and Sixpence, which itself is an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s eponymous novel from 1919. The plot is loosely based upon the life of Paul Gauguin and revolves around a stockbroker who leaves his job and family to become an artist, eventually settling in Tahiti. Following his death several years later, his doctor travels to the primitive studio he left behind and discovers his paintings—swirly, colorful landscapes and nudes—moments before the late artist’s Tahitian widow sets fire to everything. Tuymans’s interest in this topic has to do with a general negation of modernism and Hollywood’s longstanding idealization of the artist as a romantic savage. Along with the colonial context of Heart of Darkness, which is based in the Belgian Congo, the indirect reference to Gauguin evokes recent critiques of the early avant-garde’s fascination with lesser industrially developed civilizations as the “other.” The works are titled after a talking parrot’s greeting to patrons of an Antwerp bar near the city’s red light district, a tongue-in-cheek reference, perhaps, to modernist artists’ fascination with the exotic.
