The first in a unique series of anthologies which collects key writings by and on the most significant artists in contemporary culture.

Luc Tuymans is one of the most influential figurative painters working today. Born in 1958 and based in Antwerp, he has exhibited since 1985, emerging internationally in the early 1990s as an artist who has addressed not just the continuation of painting's relevance but subjects as difficult to represent as the long-lasting traumas of war, colonialism and everyday violence. Tuymans has also been a filmmaker, a curator of his own art and its context, an exhibitor of other artists past and present, and an eloquent writer on his work and that of the image-makers, thinkers and authors who affect him. His pictures are ghosted by language, always in a relationship with their precisely considered titles and the constant articulation of reflections on their themes and ideas.

Edited by the historian and publisher Peter Ruyffelaere and with an introduction by critic and curator Adrian Searle, this volume collects Tuymans' writings on his own and others' images, from Van Eyck, Velazquez and El Greco to Edouard Manet, Giorgio Morandi, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Chris Marker, Neo Rauch, Paul McCarthy and Jeff Wall. It includes dialogues with Tuymans' artist contemporaries Ai Weiwei, Kerry James Marshall and Wilhelm Sasnal, interviews with Daniel Birnbaum, Martin Herbert, Jean-Paul Jungo, Udo Kittelmann, Luk Lambrecht, Wim Peeters, Kara Rooney and Yasmine Chtchourova-Van Pee, and writings on the artist's central works and ideas by Montserrat Albores Gleason, Laura Hoptman, Joseph Leo Koerner, Takashi Murakami, Philippe Pirotte, Adrian Searle and Pablo Sigg.