Аттила Ричард Лукас: Суретшінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

Canadian artist (born 1962)

Attila Richard Lukács (born 1962) is a Canadian artist. Lukács gained international attention via his E werk series—a collection of very large figure paintings that he created in the 1980s and 90s, while living in Berlin. The paintings featured nude and semi nude skinheads, who were depicted in heroic and classical poses in chiaroscuro, reminiscent of Renaissance art. The paintings were considered provocative due to their depictions of homosexuality, sadomasochism and fascistic symbolism.

Lukács was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up in Calgary. He is the second of three sons born to Joseph and Helen Lukács. In 1984, Lukács took part in Futura Bold, a joint exhibition with fellow Emily Carr attendees Angela Grossmann, Graham Gillmore and Derek Root. The following year the four artists' work, along with four other artists, was displayed at the Vancouver Art Gallery under the name Young Romantics. During this time he became interested in the skinhead subculture and used skinheads as models for his paintings, eventually socializing with and dressing like them. Lukács did not find the success that he had hoped for on the New York art scene and suffered from a worsening addiction to methamphetamine. He left New York for Maui in 2001 to recover. While there, much of his work focused on paintings of flowers. Lukács returned to Canada in late 2002. Drawing Out the Demons, a biographical documentary film about the artist was released in 2004. The documentary opens in the summer of 2001 and documents Lukács' journey from New York to addiction recovery in Maui, then on to Calgary and back to Vancouver.

Lukács' work of the 1980s and 90s featured very large canvasses with thick applications of oil paint, along with other textural media such as tar, feathers, and gold leaf. His 1999 series, Arbor Vitae, featured a collection of black on white paintings of a single tree from a variety of perspectives. In the 2010s Lukács began producing more abstract paintings as well as sculptural and installation artworks. American art historian Jonathan David Katz has referred to Lukács as "one of the world’s greatest living artists." Lukács commented on this descriptor in a 1988 interview with Canadian Art magazine: text=I hate the term homo erotic. It's a 19th century or Victorian English term. As soon as you see a male nude in a painting, it's termed homo erotic, but when you see a female nude in painting, it's never referred to as hetero erotic. In my earlier works, like one of the big paintings shown at Mercer Union in Toronto, there was a definite so called homo erotic content. In the newer work I don't deal with that; what I'm trying to do now is deal with the male nude in the way classical nudes have always been dealt with—they don't have to have those sexual implications. Lukács said in a 2016 interview with the Vancouver Courier: Blockquote|text=I think the idea of doing the gay subject matter and skinheads [was] to make people deal with it. Remember, it was when Reagan was denying AIDS. [This said], "We exist and you have to deal with us," and putting it in front of people’s faces in an art historical context was a way for them to swallow it. Private collectors of his work include musician Elton John, film director Fred Schepisi and Canadian entrepreneur Salah Bachir.