Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket in Los Angeles at David Zwirner

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket, David Zwirner, Los Angeles / Photo by Elon Schoenholz / Courtesy David Zwirner

By LYLE ZIMSKIND March 28, 2026

We make our way around corners and pass through a few rooms in the L.A. David Zwirner Gallery to get to the massive image of decay on the very back wall which gives the eminent Belgian artist Luc Tuymans’s new show, The Fruit Basket its name. It’s not a long walk, obviously, but the brief exploratory journey to that destination piece provokes some unease. For while the ten or so paintings that lead us there present a range of stylistic themes, they also team up to generate a distinct sense that everything we’re looking at is in a state of decomposition.

By the end the pictures seem to be dissipating in front of our eyes. 

It all starts innocuously enough in the entry gallery, where the outside world is still in view behind us, with four disparate paintings that have little in common with each other. The first work we confront head on is one in the show’s series of large “Illumination” canvases, each featuring an irregularly shaped field of intensely luminous colors that swarm out at the viewer through a surrounding black framework. But since the other images in this room are more straightforwardly representational, this single iconoclast is not too overwhelming.

When we turn to enter the next viewing area, though, we’re immediately faced with another big abstract “Illumination” piece, this one suggesting a through-the-microscope view of a molecular breakdown in progress. Here, again, three other nearby paintings feature recognizable subjects, but in this space it’s the kinetic chaos of the “Illumination” image that calibrates our reception of the whole grouping. To our right we encounter in frame-filling closeup view the portrait of a maggot, one of nature’s primary agents of decomposition, which jibes with our visceral recognition of what we’ve started to experience on these successive canvases. On the opposite wall is the painting of a man bowling in a world that has completely disappeared around him, with only four remaining pins that are also on the verge of fading away.
 

 Installation view, Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket, David Zwirner, Los Angeles / Photo by Elon Schoenholz / Courtesy David Zwirner

And then there is one final room to check out. Here, of course, is that gargantuan, entire wall-occupying “The Fruit Basket,” a tableau assembled in nine panels, washed over in an intense blue that obscures the composition’s full panoply of details.  Sharing this space with the “The Fruit Basket” are not one, but the two most explosive “Illumination” paintings in the collection, joining forces with the dominant title piece to complete the effect that has steadily amplified as we made our way to this point: Everything on display is dissolving. The “Illumination” images are already there; the representational images are on their way.

Even in the one classically composed painting in this last room, the familiar group shot of a smiling family’s three generations, almost all the subjects’ eyes have evanesced and their complexions have dimmed to a pallor. It seems only a matter of time before this picture, too, may disintegrate into the form of one of the “Illuminations.”
 

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket, David Zwirner, Los Angeles / Photo by Elon Schoenholz / Courtesy David Zwirner

A wry sort of visual punch line that Tuymans incorporates into the exhibition’s big final image plays on his longstanding inclination to create paintings based on photographs and other visual media. Here, in the lower right and left corners of the bottom panels, we see the rounded tips of the artist’s thumbs, indicating that what we are looking at may not be a fruit basket, but the view of a fruit basket on an iPad that Tuymans is holding.

Which raises an intriguing question: Are any of the other images presented to us in any of the other paintings throughout this exhibition similarly mediated? (Are all of them? Is this what the “Illuminations” are?)

Another (coincidentally also Belgian) painter might have deployed an impeccably neat cursive script to assert of the show’s fruit basket centerpiece that Ceci n’est pas une corbeille de fruits. Now the cameo appearance of Tuymans’s thumbs in this culminating work may be offering a statement that is more responsive to the particular decadence of our own age’s culture of seeing: “This is not a screenshot of a fruit basket.”

The only way to exit the gallery at this point is to walk back to the beginning of exhibition the same way we came in and look at all the works again—this time with the option of a new perspective suggested by that artist’s hint in the grand-scale title painting.

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket remains on view at the David Zwirner gallery in Los Angeles through April 4.