metamorphosis Print

BIOGRAPHY Lukas Mouka is a Czech-Canadian multimedia artist and painter based in remote Northern Ontario. Over a 12 year career his unique style has evolved to incorporate diverse influences from a range of disciplines, cultures, geographies and eras into a single voice. With work that frequently situates the human figure in landscapes that are as familiar as they are alien and surreal, his work bears inflections of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but in new and unexpected contexts that blur the division between subconscious and conscious experience. His inspiration draws as heavily from the landscape and nature as it does from philosophy, religion and modernity, to create a form which is equally psychological as it is primordial. Mouka’s work is well travelled and has appeared world-wide with gallery exhibitions in Berlin, Prague, and Toronto. He has held residencies at studios in Winnipeg; Dawson City, Yukon; and Kathmandu, Nepal and his work has also appeared at the juried Toronto Outdoor Art Expo (2014, 2016) and the Ottawa Art Expo (2013) at which he was recognized with the Tom Thomson Award for Trailblazing Artists. PRACTICE Mouka’s practice primarily involves working with oil paints and canvas, using photo reference and video still source materials. In his stated goal to capture a feeling of life and the impermanence of being mid-act, he strives to strike a balance between deliberate and spontaneous brush marks. His process aims to allow the paint to intervene naturally and re-create the way in which light and physical movement can distort appearances and invent new, but fleeting, moments of meaning. Drawing on his background in classical animation where he first developed his interest in methods of depicting time, recent works seek to suspend this dimension in paint. In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Mouka’s process investigates the effects of multiple exposures applied to a figurative as a means of conveying time, memory and their effects on the present. In this approach the artist seeks to create a story which is broader than the moment of a single image and which conveys both a history and a possible future at various scales.