De.Fi.Cien.Cy

United in DE.FI.CIEN.CY are three artists from different generations and national backgrounds. Andrzej Wroblewski, perhaps Poland's preeminent postwar painter, died in 1957 at the age of thirty, and ill health forced Rene Daniels (b. Eindhoven, 1950) to end his career in 1987, whereas Luc Tuymans (b. Mortsel near Antwerp, 1958) continues to make art. The shared feature of their oeuvres is a certain inadequacy implicit in the necessity of depiction, which all three artists place at the center of their work. In Wroblewski, the figure of the "impotent witness" stands for a painting born of the survivor's guilt: he watched the Nazi atrocities but was powerless to stop them. Tuymans coined the term "authentic forgery" for his art in order to lend expression to the impossibility of a straightforward painterly approach to the twentieth century's moments of utter terror. And in Daniels, the image of the "amused muse" embodies the work of art succumbing to the commodity form. The illustrations show ca. 30 works, accompanied by observations derived from Ulrich Loock's conversations with Joanna Kordjak, Dominic van den Boogerd, and Luc Tuymans. Tuymans also discusses the selection in an interview with Anda Rottenberg. Ulrich Loock has contributed an extensive discussion of the three artists' oeuvres.