Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket / David Zwirner, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- 2 days ago
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Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket
David Zwirner, Los Angeles
February 24 April 4, 2026
New paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans - The Fruit Basket debuted at David Zwirner New York in November 2025, and this presentation marks the acclaimed artist’s first solo exhibition in LA. Collectively, the works on view consider the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches.
Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light.
An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone.
