Collectively titled “E-Werk” after a night spot in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, Attila Richard Lukacs’ macho punks of the leftist-redskin or neofascist variety are cast as laborers in the new Germany. Though as solemn as the defenders of Rome in David’s The Oath of the Horatii, 1784–85, the gay boys in these paintings, who stand, stoop, or pose in the raw, are anything but heroic. These warriors are the scarred and sacrificial residue of Germany’s cultural miasma and the nation’s seeming incapacity to deal with its past and present. They act out their private scenarios as isolated enigmas