This exhibition showcases photographs by Vancouver-based painter Attila Richard Lukacs produced over the past 25 years as referents for paintings. It is the first comprehensive exhibition of his photography, offering a new look at this internationally acclaimed Canadian artist. Working with Lukacs’ inventory of over 10,000 images, fellow artist Michael Morris selected and assembled these works for exhibition.
Utilizing the unique characteristics of the Polaroid medium, Lukacs’ painterly sensibility is evident in the rich hues, deep chiaroscuro, romantic sensuality and graphic immediacy of these photographic studies. Morris has employed simple thematic and organizational schemas to create vibrant grids, making an archive of Lukacs' work and its intense study of the male form. Collected representations of men are still rarely located outside the idiom of fashion and the arena of sport, and infrequently transcend these delineations. This exhibition provokes important questions about western culture’s negotiation of images of men, and the tradition of the nude study, and offers an extraordinary view of the subject of the human form. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Alberta.