Alexey Luka (born in 1983) is a Moscow artist, one of the participants of the Russian street art wave movement, whose creative method addresses abstract painting and rethinking of modernist traditions in urban space. Alexey Luka works with the architectural form and texture of materials, using various media, including painting, graphics, objects and installations.

Alexey Luka’s interest in the architectural component, as well as his passion for graffiti and street art, emerged during the years he studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute (MARKHI). Gradually street art became an increasingly prominent artistic trend in Russia, gaining institutional recognition along with festivals and biennales. Luka’s desire to transform his hobby and way of self-expression into professional artistic practice evolved in parallel with this process. Already at this time, after graduating from MARKHI in 2006, he began to actively engage in public art in urban spaces.

Luka's works have been several times presented at dual and collective exhibitions in Ruarts Gallery (“Wall elements” 2014; “Unforeseen Circumstances” 2015; “Dacha Season” 2017; “Wall elements 2” 2018). Alexey Luka (b. 1983) is a Moscow artist representative of the street art movement in Russia, whose creative method addresses abstract painting, as well as reinterpreting the modernist traditions of neoplasticism and constructivism in urban space. Alexey Luka often utilizes architectural form and the texture of materials, creating works by collage and assemblage techniques with recourse to various media including painting, graphics, objects, installations or site-specific projects. Since 2015 he has worked exclusively with Ruarts.

Alexey Luka’s first exhibition was held jointly with another Moscow street artist, Vova Nootk, in 2010. In subsequent years he continued to exhibit at galleries and art spaces in Moscow (in 2012 at the exhibition ‘Side B’ in the Fabrika space, together with Natalia Serkova, and in 2014 at the ‘Long Tomorrow’ show in the Pechersky Gallery with Dmitry Aske. At the same time foreign curators began to take an interest in Luka’s work. Since 2013 he has been a regular participant in group and joint exhibitions with other artists worldwide: in Paris (‘Famille Recomposée’, Galerie OpenSpace, 2013), Portland (‘Wider than a Postcard’, Breeze Block Gallery, 2013), Philadelphia (‘Direction/Instruction’, Paradigm Gallery, 2019), Amsterdam (‘Col.la.ge’, Mini Galerie, 2013); ‘Five Years’, Mini Galerie, 2019), San Francisco (‘A Major Minority’, 1AMSF Gallery, 2014), Lyon (‘Late, Still Life’, Enjoyed Galerie, 2014), Sidi Bou Said (‘Let me be your hero’, GHAYA Gallery, 2016), Catanzaro (‘AltRove Group Show’, Altrove Gallery, 2016), London (‘Contemporism’, The Old Truman Brewery, 2017), and Saarbrücken (‘ECHOES’, Zimmerling & Jungfleisch Gallery, 2018). In 2015 Alexey Luka’s first solo exhibition entitled ‘Being Here’ was held at the Wunderkammern Gallery in Rome.

Throughout his creative career Alexey Luka has remained committed to a restrained, mostly warm palette and precise handling of texture and materials, although he is starting to work in an increasingly diverse range of techniques, not limited to the format of wall painting. He not only transfers his geometric works to canvas, but also pays considerable attention to collage and assemblage. One of Luka’s most important projects in this technique was his work for the New City Festival (Nizhny Novgorod, 2014). The artist presented a composition designed to reflect his ideas about the ratio of plane and volume, the internal and external space of structures. This assemblage consisted of wooden elements attached to the veranda wall of an old wooden house, so the viewer on the street had an impression of looking inside the building and seeing its internal life and structure.

For Alexey Luka there is no significant contradiction between gallery and public space, so his assemblage designs can be found both in the niches of city walls and in art galleries: they take the form of individual panels or sculptural compositions composed of objects found on the street. At the Ruarts Gallery Luka’s works have been presented at joint and collective exhibitions (‘Wall Elements’ 2014; ‘Unforeseen Circumstances’ 2015; ‘Dacha Season’ 2017; ‘Wall Elements 2’ 2018). The large-scale murals created by the artist since 2012 within the framework of various public art festivals all over the world deserve special attention: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Astrakhan, as well as many cities in Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, France, Estonia, Slovakia and Morocco.

Relying on his architectural training and his own studies of texture and geometry in urban spaces, Luka creates murals that never burst provocatively into a familiar landscape, instead they organically integrate into the visual image of the city, taking into account its architecture and colour scheme. In Luka’s oeuvre colour improves the revelation of form instead of intercepting it, emphasizing the texture of the wall materials. The artist’s work becomes a natural part of the urban area while giving the spectator a new reading, presenting it as a kind of puzzle that must be deciphered and reassembled.

Alexey Luka is a regular participant in Russian and international biennales such as the 8th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art, the I, II, III and IV Artmossphere Biennale of Street Wave Art (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2023) and the 6th Biennale in Marrakech, Morocco (2016), as well as in major group projects in the sphere of street art (Alexey Partola’s photo album ‘Wall Elements 2’ (2018), the exhibition ‘Wall Elements’ at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg (2018), and the exhibition ‘Wall’ as part of the MMOMA Street Art Forum (2019). In 2020 he devised a mezzanine house for the Nikola-Lenivets Art Park and took part in the Here and Now Festival. In 2021 he completed a mural for the administrative complex of the Museum of Moscow.