The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is one of the most influential figurative painters working today. Born in 1958 and based in Antwerp, he has exhibited since 1985, with recent retrospectives in Europe and the United States. From the beginning, his work addressed the challenge to painting's legitimacy posed by minimal and conceptual art by taking a sidestep: creating works that seem to have emerged from a preceding era, alienated from their producer. This volume collects the artist's statements on his own work as well as his writing on other artists, filmmakers, photographers, philosophers. and writers who have engaged with his thought. The second half of the volume surveys his major bodies of work in texts by leading art historians, critics, theorists and fellow artists.