PRESENTATION: Luc Tuymans-The Fruit Basket

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Featuring subject matter that ranges from the mundane to the profound, the artist’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Thematically the solo exhibition “The Fruit Basket” picks up where Luc Tuymans’s previous exhibition, “The Barn” (2023) left off, delving further into the deleterious effects of the conflation of image and reality. Presented first in New York and subsequently in Los Angeles, the exhibition considers the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches, which are installed in an unexpected cadence across the show. Throughout, he modulates the tonality of his colors to match the heightened artificiality of the imagery he has carefully chosen, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of scale and technique.

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, “The Fruit Baske0t” (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light. An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone. The strong diagonal that cuts across the picture plane mimics the construction of the similarly scaled epic history painting “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault. In likening a fruit basket—an object that is also commonly gifted to the sick—to Géricault’s raft of the dying, adrift from a shipwreck, Tuymans emphasizes decay rather than abundance.

A related group of four large-scale works, collectively titled “Illumination”, is installed throughout the show, appearing at first as fields of color that are lit from within in a manner akin to the rectilinear abstractions of Mark Rothko—a prodigious artist whose life ended in tragedy, and an ongoing interest for Tuymans. Tuymans’s paintings harken back to 1950s and 1960s abstract expressionism and color field painting, non-referential styles that had their heyday during a period of intense sociopolitical turmoil in the US and are now the subject of renewed interest. In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues (though using no actual black pigment), applied by hand in thick bands around their borders. These off-square “frames” occupy almost as large a portion of the canvas as the actual image, further emphasizing the light that these colorful passages seem to emit—in this case reproducing the bright and mottled light that artificially results from taking a photo of a screen with a smartphone and drastically enlarging it. The subject of these paintings is amorphous, opening onto multiple readings that signal the instability of memory and the ways in which the past can be reinvented through image.

Another group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. “Hollow” (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. Meanwhile, the smallest work in the show, “The Maggot” (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound. “Migrants” (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image.

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with. “Hall of Fame” (2025) features a figure donning the yellow NFL Hall of Fame jacket and holding a football between his hands as he stares vacantly ahead, a champion of the most American of pastimes. Likewise, the last painting in the show, “The Family” (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

 Photo: Luc Tuymans, The Fruit Basket, 2025, Oil on canvas in nine (9) parts, Overall: 192 3/8 x 283 inches (488.6 x 718.8 cm), © Luc Tuymans, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info; David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 6/11-19/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/