“Drawing inspiration from cultural theorist Mark Fisher's writings on desire under capitalism, Dolly explores the tension between autonomous attraction and the forces that manufacture, monetize, and redirect it. The exhibition centers on the female body as both subject and symbol, exploring how femininity is constructed, performed, and consumed across art history, advertising, and online culture. Luckovich uses references drawn from selfies, internet imagery, advertising, and AI-generated content to distort familiar visuals into paintings that are both seductive and unsettling. Silhouettes, luminous objects, drapery, and skin appear interchangeably, conveying ambivalence between pleasure and discomfort, beauty and violence, fantasy and critique. ‘I am trying to understand how much of my desire is truly mine, and whether it is possible to move beyond the feedback loops created by the systems that shape us. The paintings don't attempt to resolve that question. Instead, they exist within the confusion, contradiction, pleasure, and anxiety that surround it.’ The exhibition's title, Dolly, is polysemous. The name Dolly is short for Dolores, a Spanish word meaning "sorrows" or "pains." Dolores is the name of the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, as well as Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell. When asked how the sheep received her name, cloning researcher Ian Wilmut famously remarked that because she originated from a mammary gland cell, the team "couldn't think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton's."Throughout the exhibition, Luckovich embraces contradiction rather than attempting to resolve it. The paintings ask viewers to consider how desire is formed, how it is observed, and how it becomes entangled with capitalistic influence. The resulting works occupy a space between attraction and repulsion, sincerity and performance, exposing desire not as something pure or singular but as a convoluted result of the modern human experience.”
text provided by Wolfgang Gallery