Artist: Martin Lukáč
Exhibition title: MacGyver
Venue: Photoport, Bratislava, Slovakia
Date: March 24 – April 22, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Photoport
The MacGyver exhibition presents a selection from the contemporary works of Slovakian painter, Martin Lukáč. This part of his oeuvre comprises mainly of paintings and drawings, presented in vast cycles in which simple image motifs are spontaneously repeated through various permutations, ultimately evoking a serialist aesthetic. In his exhibition cycles, Lukáč often works with abducted or deformed image motifs and objects. He thus creates environments in which he recomposes paintings, objects, as well as gallery interiors into new formal and semantic contexts. The title itself, MacGyver, alludes to seriality, improvisation, playful experimentation, 80s pop culture and unexpected problem solving.
The installation, prepared for Bratislava’s Photoport gallery, develops on the author’s installation strategies, and expands medium of painting. One can detect a tendency towards the philosophy and aesthetics of speculative realism, as well as the implications of a broader drift towards object-orientation. Formally, the combination of hanging paintings, paintings exhibited as objects, hoarded tennis shoes in pink netting, and design stools comprise an art space fully subjected to the artist’s aesthetic vision. Lukáč often juxtaposes visuality itself with the institutional modus operandi of both gallery and non-gallery spaces (such as showrooms, for instance). It is from such conjectures that Lukáč chooses the colour schemes, shapes and symbols which he combines both on flat surfaces and in space, and which he arranges into mutual compositional and interpretative relationships. He thus creates tension between the author’s and the audience’s perception of the object and shows it both as a commodity and an artefact – our attention becomes focused on the relationship between originality, copies and serialism, and on the difference between an original authorial gesture and a unified brand.
Martin Lukáč (b. 1989 in Piešťany) received his BA between 2009 – 2013 in the studios of Adam Szentpétery and Ján Vasilko at the Arts Faculty of the Technical University of Košice. From 2013 to 2016 he studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of Jiří Černický and Marek Meduna. Still during his studies, he has taken internships in Leipzig at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst with prof. Astrid Klein and Doctor Rudolf Hartmann and at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts where, in the studio Painting 2, he was taught by Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda. He lives and works in Prague. In 2016 he received the Critic’s Award for Young Painters.
