“I don’t believe that a painting,” the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has said, “can truly be topical.” In the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered his non-topical approach to figurative painting. Although his soft-brushed works seem to represent a single object or figure, they are layered with imagery from a variety of historical sources. He often paints with muted colors, in gentle, blurry brushstrokes that symbolize the malleability, the fragility, of memory. In this exhibition, Tuymans brings global, historical, and contemporary references together once again. —E.C.