Attila Richard Lukacs
Lily of the Valley in a Glass Vase, 2000
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Helen Lukacs’s Garden, 2007
Photo: Katherine Ylitalo

Attila Richard Lukacs
Vase of Poppies, 1991
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Helen Lukacs’s Garden, 2007
Photo: Katherine Ylitalo

Attila Richard Lukacs
Tondo with Fauna and Silver Helmet, c. 2004
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Lily of the Valley:
Attila Richard Lukacs, Still Life Paintings
Helen Lukacs, Garden

The Walter Phillips Gallery is temporarily closed. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This exhibition presents rarely seen still life paintings by Attila Richard Lukacs in dialogue with his mother Helen Lukacs’s Calgary garden. Attila Richard Lukacs was catapulted to international attention in the early 1990s for monumental, sexually charged canvases drawing on the traditions of European history painting. Little known to those outside his immediate family and close circle of friends, Lukacs has also been painting floral still lifes.

Hungarian émigré Helen Lukacs moved into her home in 1965; there she developed the bare, exposed suburban backyard into an enclosed, lush flower garden enjoyed by her family and admired by fellow gardeners. While the exhibition reiterates Attila Richard Lukacs’s dedication to the history of painting with themes of mortality and vulnerability, it equally opens a window onto the supportive relationship he shares with his mother.

Lily of the valley bloom on the artist’s birthday. When Helen Lukacs sent a bouquet to his New York studio, he painted them as a gift for his parents. The flowers became an abiding image in a series of paintings, and on the back of one, he wrote (with a characteristic knack for hidden messages), “Lilly Of the VallEy.”

— Katherine Ylitalo