About the exibition

Who has the right to decide when their body becomes an image?

Private Nude is a solo exhibition by Boris Lukić that explores the boundary between the private and the public, between the gaze and exposure, and the question of consent in the age of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence. Working from photographs found online, Lukić examines the moment when a private body becomes a public image and asks: whose body is it once it becomes an image?

The idea for the series emerged during the pandemic, when Lukić, unable to work with a live model, began searching for material for his paintings online. Among the photographs he encountered were images whose origins he could not determine, nor could he know the circumstances in which they had been created. Aware of the complexity of the material he was working with, Lukić began searching for a way to establish a distance from the images he had found. He changed his technique, moving from oil painting to watercolour in an attempt to distance himself from the immediate “reality” of the photographs.

In this process, the bodies appearing in his paintings cease to function as portraits of specific individuals and instead become situations. The photograph is no longer simply a starting point for the painting, but a space in which the artist’s gaze, the viewer’s gaze and the unknown context of the person depicted come together.

Aware that his own gaze is also part of this relationship, Lukić introduces male bodies into the series as an attempt to distribute exposure to the gaze more equally between the sexes. Yet this intervention reveals that exposure and power are not the same thing. The men depicted in these paintings choose to expose themselves, while the female bodies originate from material whose provenance and circumstances of creation cannot be established.

This difference points to an important distinction: choosing to reveal oneself is not the same as being captured. Within the space between voluntary representation and an image whose context is no longer known, Private Nude asks what happens to privacy once an image begins to circulate beyond the control of the person depicted.

In this sense, the exhibition is not only concerned with the representation of the body, but also with the ways in which contemporary technologies are changing our relationship to images, privacy and consent. The internet, social media and AI technology have made it possible for images of bodies to circulate, be appropriated, altered and reused, often outside their original context and without the knowledge or consent of the person depicted.

Private Nude therefore does not offer a definitive answer. Instead, it leaves open a series of questions that become increasingly complex as images continue to circulate: who has the right to their own image, who decides how a body will be seen, and what happens to privacy when we can no longer control where our image ends up?

Curator: Mia David