Publisher's Synopsis
"United in DE.FI.CIEN.CY are three artists from different generations
and national backgrounds. Andrzej Wróblewski, perhaps Poland's preeminent
postwar painter, died in 1957 at the age of thirty, and ill health
forced René Daniëls (b. Eindhoven, 1950) to end his career in 1987,
whereas Luc Tuymans (b. Mortsel near Antwerp, 1958) continues to
make art. The shared feature of their oeuvres is a certain inadequacy
implicit in the necessity of depiction, which all three artists place at
the center of their work. In Wróblewski, the figure of the "impotent
witness" stands for a painting born of the survivor's guilt: he watched
the Nazi atrocities but was powerless to stop them. Tuymans coined
the term "authentic forgery" for his art in order to lend expression to
the impossibility of a straightforward painterly approach to the twentieth
century's moments of utter terror. And in Daniëls, the image
of the "amused muse" embodies the work of art succumbing to the
commodity form.
The illustrations show ca. 30 works, accompanied by observations
derived from Ulrich Loock's conversations with Joanna Kordjak,
Dominic van den Boogerd, and Luc Tuymans. Tuymans also discusses
the selection in an interview with Anda Rottenberg. Ulrich Loock has
contributed an extensive discussion of the three artists' oeuvres."
