Antanas Sutkus. “Signs of our Times”

26.09.–26.10.2008

Part of the programme “Origins of Modern Russian Photography”.

The Photographer.Ru gallery (Moscow) and White Space Gallery (London) present a two-part exhibition of world classic photography by Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus.

The exhibition shown in London will be “Lithuanian Portraits" (September 11 – October 10), while in Moscow it will be “Signs of our Times” (September 26 – October 26).

The exhibitions cover two main themes in the photographer’s work. Portraits, which make up the main part of the London exhibition, full of warmth and beauty and following on from each other, like scenes from films Visconti and Rossellini never made.

The photographs, exhibited in Moscow, highlight the similarities in views shared by the Lithuanian Sutkus and other prominent European contemporaries such as André Kertész or Henri Cartier-Bresson: intense gazing at our surrounding reality; a search for a decisive moment, which will harmonize the chaotic Brownian Motion of the world; or day-to-day life as the source of inspiration and beauty. Back at the end of the 1950s, Sutkus, separated from the rest of the world's photography by the Iron Curtain, feeling the need to document the individual, independently came to the same conclusions as Cartier-Bresson had done some time earlier. And just as director Irji Menzel and director/photographer Wim Venders would do a little later.

Date: 26.09.2008
Venue: The Photographer.Ru gallery