Canadian Artist; YR (1962- )
Attila Richard Lukacs was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1962. He lives and works in Vancouver. Attila Richard Lukacs famously combines reverence and irreverence in his large-scale paintings. Lukacs graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1985 and a year later moved to West Berlin, where he would stay for a decade and make his name. Part of a group of artists known in the 1980s as the Young Romantics, Lukacs used the lauded chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the flattened planes and gold leaf of symbolist painters like Gustav Klimt to create startling works depicting homosocial and, often, blatantly homoerotic scenes. The skinheads of 1980s West Germany were of particular interest to Lukacs, who used the men of this subculture as his studio models.
Lukacs moved to New York in 1996 and to Hawaii in 2001, eventually resettling in Vancouver, where he currently lives. Later series, exhibited extensively and internationally, have depicted primates and flora, while even more recent works have veered into abstraction and installation. A 2008 exhibition, accompanied by a monograph, displayed a number of the Polaroids Lukacs took of his studio models in Berlin and New York, a body of work stored and catalogued by artist Michael Morris. Lukacs’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among other institutions.
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