Background
Lukin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1934. Between 1940 and 1949, when Lukin immigrated to the United States, Riga was occupied by either the Nazi or Soviet army, with each imposing its destructive will on the populace.
Lukin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1934. Between 1940 and 1949, when Lukin immigrated to the United States, Riga was occupied by either the Nazi or Soviet army, with each imposing its destructive will on the populace.
After graduating high school in 1953, Lukin was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. While enrolled, he attended lectures by the influential architect and urban designer Louis I. Kahn. Although Lukin left the program in 1956, Kahn's ideas had a profound impact on the young artist.
In 1958, Lukin moved to New York to pursue his career as a painter. During the 1960s, he had solo exhibitions at many of New York's most influential and prestigious galleries, including Betty Parsons Gallery in 1961, Martha Jackson Gallery in 1962, and the Pace Gallery in 1963, 1964, 1966, and 1968. During that period, his work also figured prominently in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as The Quest and the Quarry (1961, Rome-New Art Foundation), Vormen van de Kleur (1964, Stedelijk Museum), The Shaped Canvas (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Color, Image, and Form (1967, Detroit Institute of Arts), Painting: Out from the Wall (1968, Des Moines Art Center), and L'art vivant aux États-Unis (1970, Fondation Maeght), among others.
In 1972, at the height of his success, Lukin severed his ties with the Pace Gallery and refused to display his work in a commercial setting. His paintings were not seen again publicly until 1978 when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a solo exhibition of his work. In November 2010, a survey of the artist's early work, "Sven Lukin: Paintings, 1960 - 1971", opened at Gary Snyder Project Space.
Currently, Lukin's work is featured in the collections of major museums around the country, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sven Lukin was widely recognized at the time for his innovative painting-sculpture hybrids. He was one of five painters in The Shaped Canvas, the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition curated by Lawrence Alloway, that helped define a key feature of 1960s abstraction. He is highly famous for his works "Rimsky", "Orleans", "Study for Bride", and "Danielle."
Sven Lukin adheres to the artistic traditions of Post-Painterly Abstraction. Throughout his career as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Lukin has remained devoted to the use of flat areas of color and simplified figures. Lukin’s work fused the Juddian “specific object” with hard-edge painting, geometric illusionism, the exuberant palette of Pop, and a feeling for sensual curving forms that exuded a playful eroticism. Lukin also has a tragicomic view of life.
