MEMORY INSTEAD OF NARRATIVE
Art doesn’t have to be relevant to be necessary.
(On the painting of Luc Tuymans and the right of art to depth). (Cultural scandal: protests in Belgium against the destruction of the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp (M HKA)) / January 2026
Luc Tuymans at the opening of Against the Day, WIELS, Brussels, 2009. Photo © Marcwathieu / Wikimedia Commons, licensed under GFDL.
In discussions about art, the question most often asked is: what is it about? It presumes a plot, a message, a theme — something that can be retold, simplified, condensed into a headline. Yet there are artists for whom this question is not merely insufficient — it is fundamentally false.
Luc Tuymans is one of them.
His painting does not narrate history. It does not reconstruct events, nor does it seek to explain the past. Tuymans works with something far more fragile and complex: the way history remains within human consciousness and culture, long after facts have been recorded, archives opened, and witnesses have disappeared.
He does not say to the viewer: look at how it was. He proposes something else entirely: look at how it is remembered.
Tuymans is, first and foremost, a painter. He works with the canvas, with the image, with photographic and mediated sources that he then deliberately weakens. His paintings often appear muted, almost faded: restrained colour palettes, softened contours, an absence of overt dramatic gesture. Alongside his studio practice, Tuymans has realised numerous large-scale, site-specific wall paintings and mural works for major European institutions — including the Louvre — extending this restrained visual language into architectural and public space without sacrificing its introspective character.
The subjects he addresses are well known: the Second World War, the Holocaust, Europe’s colonial past, collective guilt, cultural trauma. One might assume that everything that can be said about these topics has already been said. But Tuymans’s art begins not with the event itself, but with its residue — that which resists direct representation.
One of his most significant works, Gas Chamber (1986), was made following Tuymans’s visit to the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Based on preparatory sketches and visual impressions rather than documentary reproduction, the painting contains no spectacle of horror. There are no bodies, no action, no dramatic emphasis. Only space. It is precisely this absence that transforms the image into a trap for memory: the viewer is compelled to complete the meaning internally.
For Tuymans, memory is not an archive, nor a museum repository. It is an active, unstable process — one that constantly distorts, returns, unsettles. His images do not reproduce their sources — whether photographs, film stills, or media images — but reveal the trace those images leave in consciousness. Not the fact itself, but its echo.
This is why the viewer does not remain a passive observer. One becomes a participant — not because the artist demands engagement, but because memory is always personal, even when it is collective.
In an era dominated by visual noise and cultural loudness, this gesture can appear almost confrontational. Contemporary culture demands clarity of position, rapid emotional response, immediate relevance. Yet tragic subjects do not become more intelligible through increased volume. On the contrary — they become diminished.
Tuymans chooses a different path: the path of reduction. He removes effect, commentary, explicit statement, leaving the viewer alone with an image that refuses to explain itself. What emerges is not knowledge, but a question. And it is precisely the question — not the answer — that holds the viewer within the work.
M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp), exterior view, Antwerp, Belgium. Photo © Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons.
It is no coincidence that Tuymans’s name has recently appeared within broader institutional debates. In Antwerp, the future of M HKA, one of Belgium’s principal contemporary art museums and an institution closely connected to the local artistic scene, has become the subject of intense discussion. The decision to abandon plans for a new building — a project estimated at tens of millions of euros — and to consider the redistribution of a collection of approximately 8,000 works has provoked strong reactions from artists and curators alike. At stake here is not merely a matter of funding, but a more fundamental question: what place memory and demanding art occupy within contemporary systems of priority.
As Tuymans has stated in interviews and lectures, “painting is a way of thinking through images.” There is no rhetoric in this statement. No justification. It explains everything.
Art does not need to be relevant in order to be necessary. It does not need to conform to the speed of its time. Its task is to register human presence within history, even when history appears to be complete.
Speed passes. Contexts shift. But art that compels a person to hear themselves — endures.
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