For those who’ve watched Emil Lukas’ development in the nearly 30 years that he’s been exhibiting in the Bay Area, the roots of these new works will be familiar — but the pieces themselves will be delightfully surprising.
Labor-intensive and experimental, playful and poetic, reliant on processes of accretion and his investigation of idiosyncratic materials, each type of work informs the other — an ecosystem of action and reaction.
Exquisitely strange and beautiful objects result from his eccentric, accumulative practices.
New round paintings — concave tondi with tens of thousands of criss-crossed threads stretched over the surface — are astonishingly phenomenological. In other work, masses of plastic tubes, fitted together, form jagged-edged, convex lenses. Flies-eyes that pixilate and prescribe your line of sight. And chunky cast-plaster honeycombs, each chamber individually stained through an accrual of pigments — produce shimmering fields of multi-colored dots – a kind of nonobjective pointillism.
Emil Lukas was born in Pittsburgh, PA. He has exhibited extensively internationally and has been collected by, among many others, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Anderson Collection at Stanford University.
