Luc Tuymans on starting out

With his muted palette, conspicuous brushwork and idiosyncratic approach to history, Belgian-born artist Luc Tuymans is often credited with having changed the course of contemporary art, influencing a whole generation of figurative painters.

The artist spoke to Phaidon.com about how he started out and how his career took off, despite being thrown out of all the art academies in Belgium.

Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? is the latest monograph covering a suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work produced by Tuymans between 2005 and 2010. Weaving together a range of photographic source images, from Disneyland to Big Brother, these works tell the banal but terrifying story of our times in Tuyman's chilling vision of history painting.