A&B Sound turns into art gallery for works by Attila Richard Lukacs and others
Downtown retail space turned into temporary art gallery
BY Kevin Griffin
VANCOUVER SUN
Four Vancouver artists, including Attila Richard Lukacs, are part of an exhibition in an unusual, non-traditional setting for art: the former A&B Sound store on Seymour in downtown Vancouver.
Once the place in the Lower Mainland to buy hi-fi stereos and records, the retail space awaits renovation into a nightclub, restaurant and art gallery. In the interim, it's being used as a temporary public art gallery with an exhibition curated by Lukacs that includes his own work as well as that of Michael Morris, Paul Wong and Ignacio Corral.
Modelled after the Basement Show of 2003 held in The Electra on Nelson, the exhibition is only up for a short while, until Friday, Jan. 23.
Lukacs's oil-on-canvas paintings are big, narrative works. Part of the series about where people live called In the House (of), they're gritty and visceral, messy and disturbing. Depicting both Vancouver and Maui, they're beautifully painted, a quality that contrasts with their dark subject matter that includes homelessness, police harassment and boredom. His paintings are full of working-class guys at the bottom of the social and economic order. They're about as far from the tourism marketing hype of Super, Natural B.C. as you can get.
In Oppenheimer Park/If the Dead Surprise Me I Welcome It, a forlorn skinhead faces front, his lean, naked upper body covered in tattoos. Arms by his side and hands partially cupped, he holds a couple of rocks of some drug in his left hand. Stoned and lost, he's a long way geographically and psychologically from the active, confident 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 skinheads Lukacs painted in 1989 when he was in Berlin and recording the collapse of East Germany with his paintings.
Behind the skinhead is a little dressed-up dog with a cord from a duffel bag in its mouth. The black bag has a sticker that says "I (heart) Lee Matasi," a reference to the 23-year-old artist shot and killed outside a Vancouver nightclub in 2003. Another bare-chested young man lies on the grass by a path that leads to a group of youths gathered around a park bench and police officers harassing another young man. On the viewer's right, a brown totem pole frames the painting. At the back, four working-class homes typical of the area are painted in vibrant red, yellow, blue and green. Their bright, happy colours contrast sharply with the dysfunctional figures and confrontational scenes in the painting.
On the upper level of the makeshift gallery are the gouache paintings of Michael Morris. A founder of the Western Front who lived in Berlin for years, Morris has returned to his ongoing theme of colour bar research and created paintings that are as small and condensed as Lukacs's are large and expansive. Called collectively "Zig Zags, Zigarets and other motifs," the paintings have a meditative quality to them.
Each strip of the zigs, zags and other figures comprises eight carefully painted bands of tonal variations of a single colour. What this does is create a sense of textured, curving space for each band. On top of that, the various zigs, zags and other shapes create interesting visual relationships by intersecting or being placed adjacent to one another. In one composition of brown, green and blue, for example, the brown and blue rectangles float in front of the picture plane, making it difficult to see exactly where the surface lies. In others, the rectangular shapes have curving edges that break through and beyond the edge of the work.
On opening night, someone asked if Morris's works were made by computer. They're not. They're all completely analogue. In some, Morris has deliberately not finished a line uniformly, leaving the bands ending in irregular shapes.
Video artist Paul Wong has five works in the exhibition, including East Van, a video recording the destruction of the 19th-century wooden cabins at 12th and Main/Watson in 2004. Wong now operates the On Main gallery on Main Street beside Video In.
Ignacio Corral, who recently ran Dadabase at Broadway and Main, has painted humorous and strangely sensual watercolours on paper of heads of state, some of whom embrace and kiss. They include U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and various leaders considered outlaws in the West such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Kim Jong-il of North Korea.
http://www.vancouversun.com/Travel/Sound...Richard+Lukacs+others/1177669/story.html
Prev
Linear Mode
