Luc Tuymans

Known for: muted figurative painting addressing colonial and political history

Luc Tuymans studied film as well as painting and has made documentary work alongside his primary practice, producing muted, deliberately inadequate-seeming paintings that address the violence of history — colonialism in the Congo, the Holocaust, the Belgian political scandals of the 1990s — through indirection and understatement. His restricted palette — grays, yellows, flesh tones — and deliberately deadened surface make his paintings appear almost washed out. He is widely credited with reviving figurative painting's credibility in the early 1990s.