Todd Gray: Portals
Perrotin, Los Angeles, US
Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket
David Zwirner, New York, US
Currently on view at David Zwirner in New York, The Fruit Basket marks Luc Tuymans’s eighteenth solo presentation with the gallery since joining in 1994. The exhibition brings together a group of new paintings that navigate the fractured visual and psychological landscape of contemporary America—offering an unsettling meditation on the construction of reality through mediated imagery, historical reference, and painterly reduction.
The exhibition’s titular work, The Fruit Basket (2025), is a monumental painting measuring over sixteen feet in height and twenty-three feet in width. Composed of nine separate panels arranged in a grid, the image is based on a photo Tuymans took with his iPhone of fermenting fruit, projected onto a cool-toned digital screen. Its surface is suffused with an artificial blue glow, the composition split diagonally in a visual echo of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819). As in the French master’s depiction of shipwreck and despair, Tuymans’s subject is both mundane and allegorical: a fruit basket, traditionally a symbol of abundance, now becomes a memento mori for a society adrift.
Closer inspection reveals the artist’s own fingers captured at the bottom edge of the source image—a subtle index of authorship and mediation. This is an intriguing recurring strategy in Tuymans’s oeuvre: think of incorporating his own shadow when photographing an image, or, in this case, a clumsy finger in front of the lens of an iPhone camera. An innocent, banal, and common mistake—born of a familiar awkwardness with technology—simultaneously exposes the artificiality of the image, being an image of an image, and underscores Tuymans’s characteristic distrust of images. One could even interpret this seemingly banal inclusion of the artist’s presence as a contemporary equivalent of the convex mirror in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434)—often seen as the genesis of self-conscious artistry—or of Velázquez standing in front of his canvas and becoming part of a royal portrait in Las Meninas (1656). However, with Tuymans, the artist’s presence is devoid of status or centrality. The surface of this monumental painting, like the subject, is fragmentary and diffuse. Tuymans’s imagery, as ever, works from a distance, only to disintegrate up close.
Elsewhere, Tuymans seems to depart from figuration altogether—committing to that disintegration both from afar and up close—but never resorts to the spontaneity of abstract painting. His images remain deliberately constructed. The Illumination series (2024–2025) consists of four large-scale abstract compositions that reference the meditative glow of Rothko’s paintings. Yet their origins are more oblique: zoomed-in stills taken from a documentary on the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Tuymans surrounds each panel with dense, dark borders—painted by hand in nearly black hues—emphasizing the image’s status as something seen through or emerging from shadow. In these works, abstraction and artifice blur, pulling viewers into a murky space between illumination and obfuscation.
The show’s second gallery features a group of paintings that literalize the exhibition’s themes of intrusion, fragmentation, and decay. Hollow (2025) presents the inside of a latex prosthetic mask—a depiction of emptiness masquerading as identity. The Maggot (2025), the smallest canvas in the exhibition, offers a clinical close-up of the insect: both a harbinger of decomposition and a potential agent of healing. In Migrants (2025), Tuymans captures a scene derived from a documentary photograph of displaced individuals at a border, rendered in urgent strokes of red and orange. From afar, the composition is legible; up close, it dissolves into abstract swathes of paint. It is the only work in the show based on an unmanipulated image, anchoring Tuymans’s project in an uneasy reality.
Concluding the exhibition is a series of portraits based on 3D-printed figurines of “real” people. These sculptural surrogates—eerily lifelike and wholly artificial—appear both intimate and estranged. Hall of Fame (2025) portrays a football player clad in the iconic yellow blazer of the NFL Hall of Fame. He stares blankly ahead, the embodiment of American exceptionalism caught in a vacuum. The final work, The Family (2025), depicts three generations of a family posed in staged harmony. Despite their smiles, the figures are ghostly—painted with a desaturated palette that suggests absence rather than presence. Rendered at a human scale, these works close the exhibition as it began: with an image of the familiar rendered uncanny.
Last Updated on November 11, 2025
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
