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Item: Hotelkamer [Hotel Room]

1986

Artist Novel, 50 x 60 cm.
Materials: oil, canvas

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK005778).

In Hotel Room the viewer is treated to a room’s fleeting interior. We see a night-lamp, a part of the bed, an open window and a curtain in shades of beige, light brown and grey. This strong simplification is recurrent in all of Tuymans’ works. The acrylic paint is applied in large smears. The finishing remains minimal, so the impression is rather that of a cursory sketch. The work bears witness to a desolate atmosphere, underlined by the dampened, bleached-out colours. The choice of colour is deliberate, and for Tuymans relates to both collective and individual memory, something that runs as a common theme through his oeuvre: “My colour-palette comes from the understanding that a colour-tone is more powerful than a color. Rendering colour, mixing it with a lot of white, amplifies the colour’s intensity. If you want to make work that stays in the mind by grace of its intensity, then for me you have to approach colour in an indirect way.”