Press Excerpts
E-werk
"E-werk…the gay boys in these paintings, who stand, stoop, or pose in the
raw, are anything but heroic. These warriors are the scarred and sacrificial residue of
Germany’s cultural miasma and the nation’s seeming incapacity to deal with its
past and present. They act out their private scenarios as isolated enigmas in a city where
rents have gone sky high and the tension and wild abandon that drew these people there has
evaporated now that the wall is down, though their sense of political isolation and
powerlessness has not."
John K. Grande, Artforum, April 1994
"Attila Richard Lukacs is the most talented and artistically ambitious young
Canadian painter of our time and is on a career path in visual art that promises to take
him from strength to strength."
John Bentley Mays, The Globe and Mail, February 5, 1994
True North
"In his recent installation piece called True North…we can see the raw
strength of Lukacs. The four large portraits of these hard-nosed skinheads are as powerful
a series of images as you are likely to find in any international gallery."
Art Perry, The Province, August 19, 1991
"Few artists have understood their times better than this 27-year-old painter from
Edmonton. The skill with which he creates visual metaphors of decay and destruction is
unnerving. This is the age of high-tech barbarism, and Lukacs is one of its most brilliant
chroniclers."
Christopher Hume, The Toronto Star, June 30, 1989
"His [Lukacs] accomplished, visceral paintings of 80s low-life figures in
highbrow, art-historical frameworks are at once pensive and disturbing, and their mix of
references succeed in undermining many preconceived cultural prejudices."
Deirdre Hanna, Now, June 29-July 5, 1989
The Lotus Series
"Attuning mind and body to a blissful state is clearly a theme of Attila Richard
Lukacs’ 1995 series of Lotus paintings, each portraying a naked youth seated in a
contorted pose that suggests tantric yoga. But are the young men striving toward higher
consciousness by liberating themselves from earthly desires, or are they instead
concentrating on onanistic ecstasies? Once again, this Canadian-born, Berlin based painter
offers tantalizing images that insinuate kinky possibilities but remain resolutely
ambiguous."
David Bourdon, Art in America, February 1996
The Anxious Salon
"Xenophobic thugs are thought by many to epitomize the entire skinhead
sub-culture, when in fact they represent only a portion of that population. Lukacs has
noted that "stripped of their indicators there is a uniformity," suggesting he
is more interested in the skinhead’s emblematic disaffection than in any specific
politics. Secure in their malevolent, self-absorbed rituals, these compelling figures
challenge the viewer to come to terms with the moral, social and sexual politics played
out in this provocative work."
Ron Platt, The Anxious Salon, catalogue, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1993
Varieties of Love
"Lukacs’…Varieties of Love, are boldly iconoclastic in that they
shatter the bounds of codes for depicting sexuality yet are reassuringly comforting in
their homage to form."
Susan Douglas, ARTnews, January 1993
"At 30, Attila Richard Lukacs has gained the kind of attention that some artists
never receive during a long career. He has been described as brilliant and amoral, as an
impish bad boy, en enfant terrible, a succes de scandale, and as the most ambitious and
significant artist to have emerged from Canada in recent memory."
Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald, November 1, 1992
Documenta IV - Eternal Teahouse
"In work of an entirely different sort, painter Atilla Richard Lukacs, a native of
Edmonton now living in Berlin, gives us a wickedly wondrous outdoor installation (in a
funnily elegant pissoir) of virtuoso canvases symbolizing the seasons of life, expressed
in the strongly erotic forms of posed nude men, and an indoor tableau composed of one
stuffed German shepherd, a couple of sculpted nude men, a Hitler postcard and toy tanks,
all of it adding up to a disconcerting vision just the other side of decency, somewhere in
the otherworld of sado-masochistic obsession."
John Bentley Mays, The Globe and Mail, June 16, 1992
The Military Series
"In the current series of works, Lukacs peers romantically across the 49th
Parallel, searching for a lost world, an America that has ceased to exist in reality but
is yet vital in the memory of artists and patriots. Drawn from yearbook snapshots and
publicity brochure stills, these new paintings cast a longing, and even arduous glance at
an unspoiled burgeoning manhood untrammeled by fear or experience, the naïve picaresque
hero before he receives his proverbial dose of painful reality. The works both yearn and
disturb. They threaten, inspire, and discomfort us. Theirs is a world which proffers
promise and will only provide disillusionment."
Thomas W. Sokolowski, Attila Richard Lukacs, catalogue, Diane Farris Gallery,
1990
Attila Richard Lukacs: Recent Work, Alberta College of Art
"To Robin Mayor [the curator], the monkey symbolizes "freedom, foolishness,
the combination of the two things, which is very persuasive, and that thoughtful mystery
we tend to anthropomorphize into the monkey mind because we can’t read it the way we
think we can read each other." The human side of the same coin is the skinheads. Both
images might function as masks but, Mayor says, "one never knows whegther the painter
is creating an image of a person who is hiding or a class of people who are hiding."
Nancy Tousley, Canadian Art, Fall, 1990
Artists 