Luc Tuymans creates two unpublished works for the altar of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice

From May 9 to November 23, 2025, the altar of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice will host two new works by Belgian painter Luc Tuymans (Mortsel, 1958), among the most influential voices in contemporary painting. Commissioned by the Benedictine Community of the Abbey-led by Abbot Stefano Visintin osb-in collaboration with the Draiflessen Collection, the paintings are designed to temporarily replace Jacopo Tintoretto’s two large presbyteral canvases, The Last Supper and The People of Israel in the Desert currently under restoration, which has been awaited for more than half a century and promoted thanks to the support of Save Venice.

Tuymans’ intervention is part of a path that for years has seen the Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore committed to re-establishing a fertile relationship between the Church and contemporary art. The artist, who returns to Venice after a major retrospective at Palazzo Grassi in 2019, conceived the new paintings for the Basilica’s monastic presbytery: works capable of resonating with the sacred and the architectural space. Inspired by images drawn from the memory of the artist’s travels, the canvases offer visual fragments of everyday human life, reworked through disorienting perspectives, unexpected chromatics and surreal atmospheres. Spirituality is concealed in the details of the everyday, inviting the faithful and the visitor to a silent meditation, where the divine creeps into the ordinary. The works establish a silent and respectful confrontation with the monumentality of the past, in a play of presence and absence that becomes a reflection on representation and mystery.

In the center of the Main Choir, the badalone - a monumental lectern intended for liturgical reading - will house one more work by Tuymans: a contemporary illuminated manuscript, which will then become part of the collection launched in 2019 of contemporary illuminated manuscripts made for the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore by the artists with whom it has collaborated in recent years through Benedicti Claustra Onlus, its noprofit branch.

The exhibition is curated by Carmelo A. Grasso, Director and Institutional Curator of the Abbey, together with Corinna Otto, Director of the Draiflessen Collection, and independent curator Ory Dessau.

The call for reflection is explicit: in an age dominated by visual language, how can the Church renew its dialogue with contemporary art? More than just decorating sacred spaces, art can open up new possibilities for expression and confrontation that can speak to the present and offer opportunities for research and meaning, both for believers and for those who approach the spiritual dimension more broadly. It is in this spirit that Luc Tuymans has established a dialogue with the Benedictine Community for the realization of his works.

In the project created for the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, the artist’s intent is to provoke an inquiry into the depths of one’s self and one’s history. Tuymans’ work thus intends to unite the question of representation in painting with the possibility of depicting something absent by making it tangible, and this gives Tintoretto’s two missing works a distant but appropriate contemporary echo. The aim of the project is not the reinterpretation of Jacopo Tintoretto’s works, but the possibility to confront the sacredness of the Basilica’s spaces and its history and to experiment, like Jacopo Tintoretto centuries before him, with visual perspectives, the architectural dimension of the presbytery, and the interaction of the faithful in relation to liturgical moments.

Luc Tuymans creates two unpublished works for the altar of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice

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