Boris Lukic: A Body That Isn't His, or Yours

On the walls of Galerija Novembar at 22 Kursulina Street hang watercolors of naked bodies, painted in soft brushstrokes, in places nearly transparent where the paint has been thinned with water, and no one standing in front of them, not even the artist himself, knows who those bodies belonged to before they became a painting. That is the scene opened by the new solo exhibition of Boris Lukic, titled Private Nude, and it is, in fact, the most precise description of what the show is actually about.

The series took shape during the covid pandemic, when Lukic, without access to a live model, started looking for material to paint online. He came across photographs whose origin he could not establish, nor could he say how or under what circumstances they were taken. Instead of working around that uncertainty, he decided to build it into the process itself: he changed technique, abandoning oil for watercolor, trying to distance himself from the reality of the found images. The result is a body of work in which the figures are no longer portraits of specific people, but situations, outlines without a name and without any consent to being looked at.

Lukic speaks directly about the starting point of the series, without dressing up a process that unfolded entirely outside his control.

During covid, when our options were limited, I realized that this secondary reality, the reality of the internet, was becoming our primary reality at certain moments, the reality through which we live and experience things. I understood it, at the very least, as equally important. So I started researching, and I very easily found material that interested me and was suitable for further work.

That, the artist said at the opening at Galerija Novembar, is how a moment of forced circumstance turned into a lasting artistic method.

Sources disagree on the exact opening date: Buro 24/7 announced the opening for Saturday, August 29, at 1 p.m., while Telegraf reports the exhibition opened on August 31. Either way, the show stays at the same address until October 11, open during the gallery’s regular hours, so the discrepancy in dates changes nothing about what is on the walls.

The exhibition was put together, and is written about in the curatorial text, by Mia David, artistic director of Galerija Novembar, and it is her framing that shifts the focus from the painterly gesture to a question painting alone cannot resolve.

A new phenomenon is happening today: with the rise of the internet, social media and AI technology, the question arises of whether women have been stripped of the right to their own body and privacy. For me, that’s where the question of consent comes in. Once you start taking images from the internet as inspiration, you quickly run into the question of whether those women, men, or anyone else, gave consent to be used for that purpose. I don’t think it’s a question one exhibition can answer, but we can certainly raise it.

What makes the exhibition heavier than a simple illustration of a thesis is the asymmetry Lukic built into the setup himself. He also included male bodies in the series, as an attempt to spread the exposure of being looked at, but that is precisely where it becomes clear that exposure and power are not the same thing: the men in these paintings chose to be seen, while the female bodies come from material whose origin remains unknown. The difference between showing and capturing, between consent and its absence, is the point where the painting technique stops being a purely aesthetic choice and becomes an ethical question the artist does not resolve, but puts on the wall.

Watercolor does a job here that oil could not. Where oil is textured, dense, capable of turning a photograph into a body that looks almost tangible, watercolor is transparent, unstable, prone to fading wherever the painter’s hand eases up. With that choice, Lukic does not hide that his models are phantoms, bodies pulled from other people’s photo archives whose only context was a screen. The painting becomes an admission about where the material came from, rather than an attempt to reconstruct someone’s reality, and that distinction is exactly what sets Private Nude apart from the long tradition of the painted nude as a genre.

The curatorial framing pushes that argument beyond the studio, toward a question that the rise of artificial intelligence has made almost unavoidable in any discussion of images of bodies online. Once a photograph is in circulation, without a name and without context, it stops being anyone’s property in any practical sense, and it is exactly that void, which David calls the question of consent, that the exhibition opens up rather than closes off. This is not an institution shielding an artist from the public, but a gallery putting its own uncertainty about the material it chose to show on display, which is, on the small scale of a single exhibition, a fairly rare kind of institutional honesty.

What stays with you after a visit is not catharsis but unease, and that is exactly what an ambitious exhibition about someone else’s unclaimed body ought to produce. Private Nude does not resolve the question of who a body belongs to once it becomes a painting, but it poses it precisely enough that no one leaves 22 Kursulina Street indifferent, and for a show built on other people’s photographs of unknown origin, that may be the only honest ending it could have.