Attila Richard Lukacs is well-known internationally for his dramatic paintings of the Berlin sub-cultures of skinheads and neo-Nazism during the late 1980s and his portraits of American military cadets during the early 1990s. His brutally explicit paintings of male skinheads, primates and American military cadets shocked and provoked a generation of painters and critics.
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Attila Richard Lukacs, After Goya (detail), Polaroid photograph [Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton AB, Mar 7-May 18] Courtesy of the artist
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Over the past 20 years, Lukacs has taken thousands of Polaroid photographs as studies for his work. POLAROIDS presents more than 3,000 of these photos. They have been selected, organized and grouped into grids by Lukacs’ longtime mentor, friend and fellow artist Michael Morris. Morris was present in Berlin for almost every photo shoot.
The assembled images have a rhythmic and poetic sensibility well-suited to the graphic immediacy of the individual pictures. The grid structures provide a visual framework that offers an extraordinary view into Lukacs’ study of the human form and his work with live models over the years.
Lukacs was born in Alberta in 1962. After spending 10 years living and working in Berlin, he relocated to New York in 1986. He left New York in 2001 to live and work in Hawaii before returning to Vancouver. POLAROIDS was previously exhibited at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver in 2008.
www.artgalleryalberta.com
