Venice, Luc Tuymans at San Giorgio Maggiore: two new works to replace Tintoretto canvases

Luc Tuymans returns to Venice and does so with a project intended for the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. From May 9 to November 23, 2025, the Belgian painter will be featured in a new commission at the house of worship, one of the symbolic places of the lagoon city and its religious and cultural history. Two new, specially made canvases will take their place on the Basilica’s high altar, temporarily replacing the 17th-century canvases by Jacopo Tintoretto, which are currently undergoing conservation restoration after more than half a century. The initiative is the result of a collaboration between the Benedictine Community of San Giorgio Maggiore - led by Abbot Stefano Visintin osb - the Benedicti Claustra Onlus and the Draiflessen Collection. The latter, along with the Benedictine monks, commissioned Tuymans to create the works, confirming the Church’s renewed commitment to fostering a meaningful dialogue with contemporary art.

Tuymans, born in 1958, is considered one of the most influential painters of his generation. After a major retrospective at Palazzo Grassi in 2019, his return to Venice is part of a research path that aims to combine memory, everyday life and spirituality. The two canvases, designed specifically for the presbytery of the Palladian Basilica, take inspiration from images the artist has collected in his travels: fragments and seemingly ordinary details that, through his painting, are charged with an enigmatic and transcendent meaning. Tuymans’ paintings are distinguished by his choice of unusual, often muted or desaturated color tones, disorienting perspectives and suspended, almost surreal atmospheres. The narrative does not follow a linear or didactic path, but invites the visitor to search for the divine in the everyday, in the folds of the simplest reality. This is precisely the goal of the intervention: to build a spiritual and cultural experience for the faithful and visitors to the Basilica, stimulating reflection, introspection and confrontation.

The initiative, 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, is part of a journey that has been underway for more than a decade now, aimed at re-establishing a fertile relationship between the Church and the language of contemporary art.

Also underscoring the project’s exceptional nature is another element: in addition to the two paintings, Luc Tuymans is engaged in the creation of a contemporary illuminated manuscript, which will be displayed in the center of the Major Choir, on the lectern of the badalone, the place of choral prayer of the monastic community. This work will add to the collection of contemporary illuminated manuscripts launched in 2019 by the Benedicti Claustra Onlus, and which already boasts the contribution of several contemporary artists. It is a concrete testimony to the willingness of the Benedictine community to be open to the present, offering artists a space to express their research through languages that are new but deeply linked to tradition.

Over the centuries, the Church has played a crucial role in promoting art, contributing to the birth of masterpieces that still define our cultural heritage. However, in recent times, this relationship has weakened. The Church’s presence as a patron of works of art has diminished, giving way to a cultural landscape in which the interaction between spirituality and artistic language appears more rarefied. Tuymans’ intervention, on the other hand, aims to show that this dialogue can be not only recovered but also revitalized through courageous and contemporary experiences. For the Belgian artist, painting is a means of exploring the invisible dimensions of reality. His paintings, often deliberately blurred and imbued with muted hues, stage an aesthetic of subtraction, in which what is hushed or merely suggested takes on extraordinary evocative power. This is not mere decoration, but a process of investigation: the work of art becomes a mirror capable of returning to the viewer the reflection of his or her own interiority.

In this sense, the project for San Giorgio Maggiore is neither meant to be a reinterpretation nor a replica of Tintoretto’s masterpieces. On the contrary, it intends to represent an autonomous and deeply contemporary act, in which Tuymans had the freedom to measure himself against the sacredness of the space, its history and the interaction between architecture, liturgy and community. His works confront the monumentality of the Basilica, establishing a silent but powerful dialogue with the faithful and pilgrims who daily pass through the nave.

Luc Tuymans, who lives and works in Antwerp, has been featured in numerous international exhibitions in cities such as New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Chicago, Toronto, Osaka and Beijing. His poetics has often confronted traumatic historical events: the Holocaust (with the work Gaskamer, 1986), Belgian colonialism(Mwana Kitoko, 2000) and terrorism(Still Life, 2002), using images of everyday life as a tool to evoke a sense of disquiet and stimulate critical reflection. His first participation in the Venice Biennale was in 1997, with the painting Illegitimate II, followed in 2001 by the representation of Belgium with the exhibition Mwana Kitoko. Beautiful White Man, centered on Belgian colonial history and the independence of the Congo. In 2019, Palazzo Grassi hosted La Pelle, his first Italian retrospective, with more than eighty works created since 1986. Today, his four murals entitled L’Orphelin are on permanent display at the Louvre’s Rotonde Valentin de Boulogne.

Venice, Luc Tuymans at San Giorgio Maggiore: two new works to replace Tintoretto canvases

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