These developments, with all their ambiguities and distortions, have long been the subject of exploration by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans whose large-scale works are currently on view in “The Barn,” an exhibition at David Zwirner.
While Tuymans creates paintings, his works are photo-based, and taken from fugitive source materials meant to distance viewer from meaning.
Tuymans’s art has always marked the spot where memory and history, truth and fiction collide, and if that sounds a bit like German artist Gerhard Richter, well, Tuymans, who is well over a generation younger, does owe a considerable debt to him. Both are painters who deal with how photography and its derivatives are just as likely to conceal as reveal historical events and collective trauma, though having grown up under Hitler and Communism, Richter’s experience with the same is more lived than received.