Held at the National Gallery of Art the exhibition “Let’s Enter a New World. A Retrospective of Photography by Vitas Luckus” (06.12.13-16.02.14) was an outstanding event in the context of exhibitions on modern Lithuanian art and photography. It opened up an exclusive layer of Lithuanian modern culture to the art audience: a wide panorama of the unique work by Luckus presented publicly for the first time.
Vitas Luckus (1943-1987) is one of the most significant Lithuanian photography artists of the second half of the 20th century. In his work Luckus bridged tradition and the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism. Along with Antanas Sutkus, Aleksandras Macijauskas, Romualdas Rakauskas, Algimantas Kunčius, and other peers Luckus founded the base for the Lithuanian photography school. In original expression he greatly expanded the boundaries of the prevailing aesthetics in photography. Luckus worked both in artistic and applied photography: he was one of the most innovative creators of fashion and advertising photography.
According to Margarita Matulytė, the curator of the exhibition, Luckus was “a man of the fading modernism era who sensed the exhaustion of photography as a traditional expressive form and attempted to reanimate it in his documentary works, surreal montage series, and conceptual book projects. Yet everything the artist revealed his free mind through and thought about was ‘human, all too human’. Luckus eschewed compromises and obligations, fostered no illusions and did not encourage idealization, did not seek justice and disliked uncertainty, declared war on himself and truce on others. And he grabbed life by the lapels and drew it so close to himself that he heard its deep and dense breathing, which he managed to respond to with repressed rage and mad love – it is precisely this concentrated state that fills all of the artist’s work.”
In the exhibition, major photography series by Luckus were presented in five sections: “To Keep Vigil. Between Life and Death”, “To Travel. To the Edge of the World”, “To Construct. Other Realities”, “To Perceive. People en face”, and “To Think. The Mimes’ Zone”, fully revealing the artist’s oeuvre. The photographs were accompanied by Luckus’ own insights on the medium of photography and the biography section.
Curator Margarita Matulytė
Exhibition architect Julija Reklaitė
For more information see ndg.lt
Photographs by Marta Ivanova
