In 2010, the Municipal Gallery hosted an exhibition by Vitas Luckus, one of the most influential figures in the photographic landscape of the former USSR, the founder of conceptual photography, and a representative of the Lithuanian School of Photography. The exhibition included works taken in Ukraine, Estonia, Bashkortostan, and Azerbaijan.
Known for his reportage photography, the artist has formed his own alternative approach to the craft, allowing the author to organically combine two completely opposite foundations: documentary realism and imagination. Starting with photojournalism, the artist remained true to it in his artistic searches. In many of his cycles, where there is a desire to achieve a conceptual goal, the materials were taken from life itself, and its heroes were peasants, city children, and random passersby. He was the first to “break through” the national isolation of Lithuanian photography and for a long time remained a “forbidden” Soviet photographer.
It is also worth mentioning the close connection between Ukrainian and Lithuanian artists. Contacts with Lithuanians strongly influenced the formation of the “Chas” group – the first generation of the Kharkiv School of Photography, in particular the work of Boris Mikhailov, about whom we wrote in our previous posts.
At that time, thanks to the fruitful cooperation between the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania and the Municipal Gallery, the third art project related to the art of Lithuania was presented in Kharkiv: the first presented works by three representatives of the middle generation of Lithuanian photographers. The second – a project by a young artist from Vilnius, who won the “Non Stop Media-5” festival. Finally, an exhibition of works by the classic of Lithuanian photography – Vitas Luckus!
