The artistic practice of Canadian artist Attila Richard Lukács primarily manifests itself in painting, and is rooted in both high and low culture. He has been experimenting with the medium, and its redefinition, since the 1980s. In 1985, he was selected for the group exhibition ‘Young Romantics’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he showed alongside artists such as Angela Grossman and Derek Root. It was this show that launched his career.
His often-monumental paintings recall the works of the German artists Norbert Tadeusz and Neo Rauch and are permeated with references to great masters such as Giotto, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Jacques-Louis David. With a technical precision, Lukács paints contemporary themes linked to lust, power, eroticism and masculinity whilst borrowing and dislocating techniques, compositions and motifs from the history of painting. In his work, he combines a classical style with an execution that is reminiscent of American abstract expressionism.
From the beginning of his artistic career, it was clear that Lukács was primarily interested in the representation of the male body, as evidenced by his early paintings of soldiers and athletes. Lukács further deepened this fascination in 1986, when he moved to Berlin at the age of twenty-four for a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. While there, he created ‘E-Werk’, a series of monumental paintings in which he depicts naked and semi-naked skinheads as they work, in sometimes heroic and sometimes erotic poses, as a parody of the social-realistic painting of the Soviet Union. The skinheads who modelled were part of Lukács’ social milieu. He had them pose and photographed them with his Polaroid camera. In addition, he based the series partly on art historical antecedents and partly on reference images from pornographic magazines. Lukács portrays the skinheads as ideal male bodies. Here, the skinhead serves as an object of desire, or a symbol of a new political energy, without Lukács committing to the associated ideological ideas.
The ‘E-Werk’ paintings, executed with thick brushstrokes and finished with materials such as tar and gold, were regarded as provocative due to their charged allusions to sadomasochism and to the aesthetics and symbolism of fascism. This places the viewer in an uncomfortable position of both attraction and repulsion. Lukács, who stresses that ‘E-Werk’ is about the male body, distances himself from the term homoerotic. This word, which was often used in the 1980s and 90s to describe the works, nevertheless attests to how the series is viewed in relation to the ‘queering’ of painting. Lukács challenges, interrogates and appropriates the classical Western painting traditions, whilst propagating an open gender identity or broad sexual identity. Since the 2010s, his work has increasingly been shown in group exhibitions about queer histories such as ‘Drama Queer: Secuding Social Change’ (2016) and ‘About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art’ (2019).
Lukács emigrated from Berlin to New York in 1996. The new work that he produced in America was utterly unlike his earlier paintings. For example, ‘Arbor Vitae’ (1999), comprises a series of black-and-white paintings of a tree painted from different perspectives and inspired by the photographic practice of the Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko. In the same period, he produced the series ‘Myths About My Garden’ (1999), which was inspired by Persian and Indian miniature painting. As the result of a depression and excessive drug use, Lukács left New York in 2001. He moved to Maui in Hawaii where he focused on painting flowers during his recovery.
In 2002, Lukács returned to Canada, his country of birth, and produced a series of monumental paintings in response to the American invasion of Iraq and the related propaganda campaign. From 2011, Lukács also experimented with abstract painting and he created a series of grisailles. Alongside painting, Lukács was also engaged in other forms of artistic expression. For example, from the 2010s onwards he also made collages, sculptures and installations. Lukács’ nomadic lifestyle was reflected in his artistic practice, which forms the basis for the documentary film ‘Drawing Out the Demons’ (2004, directed by David Vaisbord).
