Antanas Sutkus, Songs’ Festival. Day of Dances,_Silver gelatin print, 1975
On June 26, at 6 pm, Galerija Vartai gallery presents the solo exhibition Untitled by the internationally acclaimed legendary Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus. The exhibition dedicated to the Lithuanian photography master’s 75th anniversary brings together selected photographs previously not shown to the Lithuanian public.
Antanas Sutkus’s photographic archive contains more than half a million objects. For several decades he has been carefully reviewing it, transferring the most interesting and successful works onto paper. The photographs selected for the exhibition encompass the photo artist’s whole creative career, from the mid-20th century to the beginning of the 21st. Curator Julija Chistyakova has grouped Antanas Sutkus’s works into several series which reflect the master’s long-term artistic practice: Portraits, Women, Children, and Street Scenes. Each of these comprises photographs taken during various periods, displayed in separate groups. According to the curator, this conception allows the viewer to rediscover this classic of Lithuanian photography and see how his relationship with people, politics and architecture has changed over his lengthy career. The photographs are accompanied by posters and catalogues from various periods, as well as personal photographs and films about the master’s life and work.
In his works, Sutkus conveys a humanist approach to photography, encouraging the public to reflect on our living environment. ‘The basic recipe of good photography is this: one must love the land and the people one takes photographs of,’ – Sutkus claims. He refers to his works as ‘subjective realism’, because his ‘archives of the everyday” are memoirs permeated by the artist’s own personality, rather than the cold capturing of faces and events. These memoirs are filled with love, despair, unforgettable meetings, and heartbreaking betrayals.
Each photograph brings a splinter of past time into the exhibition’s space, with a distinctive light and mood of that time, a longing for a different kind of life. The monochrome photographs of Sutkus revive, in a paradoxical way, even the sounds: the hum of the city streets, the voices of children, or the silence of the moment which envelopes you when you look at the person taking a photograph of you. When one meditates on Sutkuss work today, it looks like a long and important study that never sought to identify the ‘ zone of influence ‘ of its works or their ‘action’, but characterizes the connections between the place and the viewer, the work and its content, the individual and collective memory.
The power of Antanas Sutkus’a artistic language and the sphere of his creative work have made the photographer a member of the global cultural elite. Over the fifty years of his creative work the artist has held hundreds of solo exhibitions and is constantly invited to take part in prestigious projects throughout the world. Works by the artist are included in some of the world’s most famous art and culture collections, including the Lithuanian Art Museum, the National Library of France in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Dresden Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Paris Museum of Photography, and many others. The work of Antanas Sutkus has received wide recognition through numerous awards such as the Lithuanian National Culture and Art Prize.
Curator Julija Čistiakova
