La Pelle - Luc Tuymans

Ms. Bourgeois named the exhibition, "the skin" in Italian, after Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s 1949 novel. It featured 80 works from the Pinault Collection, international museums and private collections that the Belgian artist made between 1986 and the present. In no chronological order, "La Pelle" set up a dialogue between his conceptual and expressive works based on an original layout and contrasts. For the show, in the palace atrium he created Schwarzheide, an imposing marble mosaic reproducing his eponymous 1986 work named after a Second World War German labour camp. The exhibition allowed to understand the artist's project on the duality of our world, both warlike and peaceful.

The event belonged to the series of monographic and carte blanche exhibitions devoted to major contemporary artists that the Palazzo Grassi has hosted since 2012 in alternation with the thematic exhibitions of the Pinault Collection.