VLADIMÍR BIRGUS: PHOTOGRAPHS
Curator: Václav Podestát
Birgus’s photographs at first glance tell of miniature events taking place in the quaintest of places
on our planet, but upon closer examination they tell mainly of today’s globalized society, which is in a permanent hurry, about loneliness in the crowd, about the contrasts between dream and reality, about what is not explicitly expressed but is only intuited with difficulty, that is, about our inner state, which we carry in our souls in various degrees of tension. The selection for this exhibition includes details of various interiors and exteriors, whose clever compositions and colour schemes intensify the pictorial symbolism as well as the uncertainty about whether we are looking at a depiction of the real world or an artificial one: the fragment of a living-room with a glowing window, a discarded tin can covered with the unreal colours of the concrete pavement, the joined hands of figures in a wooden sculpture group. Similar melancholy and surreality also appear in many of the juxtapositions of people and environments or various coexisting stories exposed in split seconds behind the scenes of our present time. Feelings from places spill over into colours, and in ingeniously depicted scenes we sense the subconscious inspiration provided by paintings of Edward Hopper or Eric Fischl. Whereas Birgus used to employ the penetratingly dominant reds and yellows found in the urban environments in which we encounter solitary individuals in the midst of the crowd, now, it is the ‘muting’ of the actors of the existing stories, which strikes us. In the past, a more closed action opened onto broker pictorial planes, and the atmosphere of light intensified the overall composition. In some cases we could suspect the photographer of manipulating the image, which is so easy to
achieve these days. The term ‘sophistication of the depicted action’ must now be said to be equivalent to the term ‘unmanipulated reality’.
Václav Podestát
GALERIA FF
Łódzki Dom Kultury
Traugutta 18
opening hours
Tue–Sat: 2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
additionally:
13.05 (Sun) 12 p.m. – 6 p.m.
20.05 (Sun) 2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
opening: 12.05, 7 p.m.
exhibition will be held: 12.05–23.06
