Valeriy Lukka

Valeriy Lukka was born in 1945 in the village of Porokhovo, Yaroslavl Oblast. Graduating from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad in 1977, he started his artistic career in the same city. The artist currently lives and works in St. Petersburg.

In the late 1970s, Academy of Arts’ alumni Vyacheslav Mikhailov and Valeriy Lukka, joined by Felix Volosenkov, emerged as an artistic collective whose aim, like that of all other artistic collectives, was to search for new means of creative expression. In order to achieve the required artistic effect, they would use relief-like layers of paint. Thus the artists disowned the painterly tradition they knew so well and respected in favour of making their works as lifelike as possible by turning them into something organic. Notwithstanding the fact that their art retained references to literature and timeless mythological imagery, in the spotlight was the nearly physiological texture of their canvases. Lukka’s paintings are sincere, at times verging on morbidly hysterical, but, as any true product of Postmodernism, are not devoid of irony and full of allusions to classical art.