Eternity

This recent painting by Luc Tuymans is based on the image of the glass dome that Werner Heisenberg built in his laboratory in 1937 to model the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, which here is reproduced at a monumental scale that greatly exceeds that of the original object. A major figure of theoretical physics, Heisenberg directed Germany’s attempts to build nuclear weapons during WWII, although we don’t know whether he was ultimately helping or hindering this effort. The subject of Tuymans’ paintings does not reside in the atrocities themselves, instead in the way they are integrated into the historical narrative and collective memory through images that are potentially indeterminate, multi-specific, and often hard to interpret.