It has been decades since Giuseppe Ducrot began making religious sculptures—in bronze and ceramics, in the tradition of master sculptors. Living in Rome, of Neapolitan descent, Ducrot makes portraits of saints and other religious figures with the same precision and expression as some would have done 500 years ago.

For his new exhibition at David Zwirner, first in New York then in Los Angeles, Luc Tuymans wanted to confront a challenge: how can a painter address the fact that we are now all used to experiencing backlit frames? This question is a pictorial one: it speaks to the relation between painting and the world of images.