Attila Richard Lukacs

 

Attila Richard Lukacs was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1962.  He graduated with honors from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1985.  With a strategic move to Berlin in 1986, Lukacs positioned himself within the social and cultural environment of the increasingly visible skinhead movement in Germany.  After spending ten 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.  Lukacs is known predominantly for his paintings of male skinheads, primates and American military cadets during the early 1990s. These brutally explicit works shocked and provoked a generation of painters and critics alike.  During his time in Hawaii, Lukacs created a beautiful series of paintings with gold leaf entitled Flowers. The images are lush with decorative patterning and an oriental sensibility.  In 2003, Lukacs returned with a vengeance to earlier themes of homosexuality, social deviance, sexual aggression, punishment and male supremacy in Of Monkeys and Men.  Lukacs work is frequently fetishistic and invariably provocative.  In terms of art history, Lukacs appears at the height of a revival of figurative painting in Europe and North America

 

Exhibitions:

 

2004                 Attila Richard Lukacs, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

2003                 Of Monkeys and Men, Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver, BC

2002                 Flowers, Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver, BC

1999                 Arbor Vitae, Diane Farris Gallery Vancouver, British Columbia

1999                 Futura Bold - Fifteen Years Later, Diane Farris Gallery Vancouver, BC

1998                 Galerie OZ Paris, France

1997                 Odd Bodies, The National Gallery of Canada Ottawa, Canada

1996                 E-werk, London Regional Art and Historical Museums London, Canada

1994                 E-werk, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal Montreal, Quebec

1994                 Informing Visions, Walter Phillips Gallery Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta

1992                 Documenta IX Kassel, Germany

1992                 Varieties of Love, Diane Farris Gallery Vancouver, British Coloumbia

1990                 Bilder, Moderne Kunst Dietmar Werle Cologne, Germany

 

Collections:

 

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario                Froahlich Collection, Germany

Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, Germany            Ottawa Canadian Embassy, Saudi Arabia

Collection of Sir Elton John, London, England       London Regional Art Gallery, Ontario

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Québec        National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Belgium          Praxis Collection, Vancouver, BC

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC              Seymour Collection, Vancouver, BC

University British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery        Zia Collection, Zurich, Switzerland

Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia               MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA