“Memories of the past concealed in the far reaches of individual memory are snatched out by the bright beam of the subconscious, transporting to our present time the significant moments of bygone events, the associative objects, whether this is a medicine cabinet that once hung in the apartment where a person grew up, a shelf with books and trivia, or a trunk for equipment that he, his relatives or friends once used. We no longer recall what was stored inside, or the milieu of the object has already faded in our memory to such an extent that the mind has to complete and replace the past environment. This project is about a single space of life and the memory that compresses this space, sometimes abruptly depriving us of vast time intervals for a second, as we suddenly plunge into past moments. Memory has material and non-material properties, it settles in the joints of collage elements in the artist’s objects, in the material itself,” says Olga Turchina, senior researcher at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, where Alexey Luka’s solo exhibition curated by her is set to open in September.

Playing with fragments in space, with the scales and relationships between foreground and background, based on his own vocabulary of forms, Alexey Luka tries to find the line between reality and fantasy. Found elements that retain the imprint of history are transformed. Alexey builds a kind of personal therapy space conducive to reflection, where all those who enter the artist’s field can be immersed in the depths of individual recollection and encounter real memories in a safe place.

___________________________

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’s interest in the architectural component, as well as his passion for graffiti and street art, emerge during his studies at the Moscow Architectural Institute. Gradually, street art became an increasingly prominent artistic movement in Russia, having acquired institutional recognition owing to numerous festivals and biennales. In parallel with this process, Luka’s desire to transform his hobby into professional artistic practice grew.

Alexey Luka is a frequent participant in the Russian and international Biennales (I, II and III Street wave art biennale “Artmossphere” (2014, 2016, 2018), the 6th Biennale in Marrakesh, Morocco (2016)), as well as in important collective projects (the first integral research on Russian street art «Wall elements» by Alex Partola (2018)) and exhibitions («Wall elements» at the Central Exhibition Hall Manege in St. Petersburg (2018), «The Wall» as a part of the Street Art Forum in MMOMA (2019)). Besides, Alexey regularly creates large-scale murals participating since 2012 in various public-art festivals all over the world: in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vyksa, Rostov-on-Don and Astrakhan, as well as in many cities of Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, France, Estonia, Slovakia and Morocco.

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; “Phantom Memories” 2023).