“The first is autobiographical because my mother was Dutch and my father was Flemish. “There are two reasons for this,” Tuymans explains. The artist has returned to the horrors of Nazism again and again throughout his career there are 14 paintings on display here that deal with the Third Reich, ranging from a triptych of works exploring how the Nazis profaned their victims’ bodies-one shows a lampshade made out of human skin, another a single tooth-to a painting made last year of the door to Hitler’s bunker, Dead End (2018). “That’s a very optimistic way to look at it,” Tuymans says. But if you think that the juxtaposition of the two works represents the defiance of prisoners in the face of unspeakable evil, think again. Hanging at the top of the first sweep of the palazzo’s grand staircase, a small portrait of Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Nazi party and the Third Reich’s minister of armaments and war production- Secrets (1990)- overlooks the mosaic. Luc Tuymans's Schwarzheide (2019) at the Palazzo Grassi, © Palazzo Grassi, Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti “The vertical sections on the mosaic represent the strips,” Tuymans explains. During the war, some of the prisoners there made drawings, which they tore into strips to hide them from guards. This is based on a painting Tuymans made outside a German labour camp at Schwarzheide, north of Dresden. Upon entering the 18th-century palace, visitors first encounter a giant floor mosaic of pine trees with parallel vertical lines interrupting the composition. The show is entitled La Pelle (skin) after a 1949 novel by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte that is set in Naples at the tail end of the Second World War when “Europe was in chaos, just like today,” Tuymans says, speaking at the exhibition’s opening on 22 March. More than 80 paintings are on display, two-thirds of which were made recently. Now he is back in the city that cemented his reputation as the press-anointed “saviour of painting” with a spectacular and wide-ranging exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, the French billionaire François Pinault’s gallery on the Grand Canal. Eighteen years ago, Luc Tuymans took the Venice Biennale by storm with his paintings for the Belgian pavilion that examined the country’s brutal colonial history in the Congo.
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