Hunted Projects is pleased to present an online exhibition of new works by Slovak artist Martin Lukáč (1989). Keepin’ It Thoro is Lukáč’s debut exhibition with Hunted Projects. 

Keepin’ It Thoro highlights a new series of works on paper that expand on Martin Lukáč’s signature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series. The anthropomorphic mutant turtles, well known among the cultural milieu of Lukáč’s generation who grew up during the complex years of Czechoslovakia’s post-socialist transformation, is a cultural signifier of Western pop-culture infiltrating post-communist Eastern Europe. In the 1990s, Lukáč and his peers became inundated by visual representations of these cultural heroes which became a cultural article, being used in a wide spectrum of products, often imbued with many manufacture inaccuracies, discolourations, or other visual idiosyncrasies which differed from the prototypes. The sheer number of these products gave the illusion of opulence and plenty, which promised economic equality with the developed west, the birthplace of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Lukáč’s Ninja Turtles’ portraits own a powerful expressionistic sensibility. Neither fully figurative nor completely abstract, this series of small-scale works are the result of a continued exploration of cultural appropriation. The TMNT characters Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo are revisited with an alternative choice of materials. Pastel, charcoal and acrylic paint offer Lukáč’s intimate scaled works an immediacy and gestural bravado that is both graphic and strikingly unruly.