January 14 - March 13, 2010
Illingworth Kerr Gallery | ACAD
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM | Tuesday to Saturday
Public Reception
January 14, 2010 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Everyone Welcome
Free to All
Organized and circulated by
The Art Gallery of Alberta
Attila Richard Lukacs attended the Alberta College of Art + Design in the early 1980s before enrolling at the Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver. He graduated in painting from Emily Carr and his large-scale history paintings and controversial subject matter was met with great critical acclaim. He moved to Berlin and eventually New York to live and work. His production in Berlin was particularly significant and he participated in major solo and group shows throughout Europe and North America including the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, documenta 10, Dietmar Werle Gallery (Cologne), Diana Ferris Gallery (Vancouver), the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Phyllis Kind Gallery (New York) and many others. Lukacs returned to ACAD several years ago at the behest of Ron Moppett to be artist-in-residence for a month-long series of student encounters and to produce new paintings. In January 2010 he returns to ACAD once more, but this time he presents an extraordinary exhibition of Polaroid photographic studies of the numerous studio models that inform his paintings.
Alex with Skull
Atilla Richard Lukacs
Atilla Richard Lukacs
Throughout the last twenty years Lukacs has been known for his large-scale paintings of homoerotic skinheads and uniformed young men, his investigations of exotic landscapes and especially for his handling of paint, tar and other materials applied to various support surfaces. Less well known is his preparatory work with models photographed with a Polaroid square format integral film camera. The instant portraits, taken by the thousands over the years, became an integral part of his painting process, anything but disposable ephemera. They became footnotes for manipulating images on canvas. Each Polaroid acts as a shorthand for figure studies that would inform the strategic planning of his elaborate and celebrated paintings. The photographic images allowed Lukacs to better place the painted representation of the whole or partial figure against variously charged foregrounds and backgrounds, permitting him to delve deep into art historical references and the structuring of representation. From a labyrinth of references, including Caravaggio and Goya, the sense of kinship and respect is obvious.
What Lukacs so deftly pulled from the art historical carnage is a unique approach to perspectival angularity in his subjects. This approach skews realism and the irreal and gives his subjects an uneasy psychological edge. The real/irreal figures are conspicuous in another way. The majority of the Polaroids are of nude or semi-costumed skinheads reminiscent of a 19th and 20th-century Northern European ideal - the well proportioned, masculine, unself-consciously sensual male. Lukacs is attuned to the sepia toned appeal of the Aryan male and its periodical re-emergence as an ideal in the mass media, how that appeal plays upon strong desires, bringing knowledge and pleasure together in the recognition of a classic unity and order of the object of interest. It is as if Lukacs engages the Polaroids to revisit 19th-century rational knowledge of the organic coherence of everything that exists, and twist this philosophical sentiment slightly. Everything is ascribed an esthetic or skewed hedonistic value which unfolds in his engrossing paintings.
A critical focus on the Polaroids expands on the provision of its title, the arrangement of the Polaroids and their framing. The Polaroids dramatize an assemblage of fractured parts in an attempt to penetrate to the foundations of the aesthetic act that Lukacs constructs in the medium of both Polaroids and paint. Furthermore, the carefully selected groups of Polaroids in close proximity to Attila's paintings fosters highly imaginative, recontextualized readings. Viewers are able to assess Lukacs’ best known work with fresh eyes. POLAROIDS: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris is undoubtedly a ground-breaking exhibition and catalogue that locates various critical perspectives in the touchstone Polaroids produced systematically and consistently in various locations between Calgary and Berlin over the past 20 years. The upcoming exhibition monograph co-produced by the IKG marks a curatorial undertaking complicated by its origins in painting, photography and the contradictions of North American contemporary morality, within which the Polaroids may be read very differently.
Wayne Baerwaldt, Director/Curator, Exhibitions, ACAD
