BINDE 100–10
To mark the 90th birthday of the legendary Latvian photographer Gunārs Binde, on 21 September the artist's personal exhibition BINDE 100–10 will be opened in the right wing of the 2nd floor of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga). Before the opening of the exhibition an ambitious photo album BINDE 100–10 is also planned for release.
During his photographer's career spanning 66 years, Gunārs Binde (1933) has received both local and international recognition, his works earning dozens of awards in foreign photography salons. The exhibition BINDE 100–10 will reflect the artist's path towards and through these achievements by creating a metaphorical diary of key events, themes and people, while occasionally interspersing the visual narrative with Binde's own comments about the background of the making of a specific photograph.
Looking back at the beginnings of the artist's creative career, a significant turning point was his work in the theatre. This is where Binde learned the art of light, as he himself puts it in the forthcoming book, becoming a “master of light”. Theatre brought Gunārs Binde together with a companion in the making of staged photography, artist and stage designer Arnolds Plaudis, while almost 30 years later – with his muse and wife Tatjana, together with whom he tricked gravity in the series Flight.
At the theatre, Binde perfected his refined style based on the principles of light and shade, becoming known chiefly with his black-and-white photographs, among which nudes have earned particular attention. Irrespective of genre, the use of colour or theme, for Binde a photograph becomes art through the creation of the artistic image. In the forthcoming book, the artist stresses: “A picture does not always contain an image. An image is what affects you, makes you crazy, you swoon, you are enthralled. It is a generalisation, ir refers to something significant, it is impossible to concretise”. Starting from the late 1960s, it was typical for Baltic photographers to stylistically play with a poetically romantic atmosphere, creating symbolic images and analogies of figurative meanings and the inner world of emotions. This can also be observed in Binde's widely-known photographs The Wall (1964) or his portrait of Eduards Smiļģis, (1965), which, as the artist explains, succeeds in depicting the tragedy of the sunset of an old person's life.
Accompanied by specially created scenography, the exhibition BINDE 100–10 will bring together the above-mentioned and other canonical photographs with surreal and abstract compositions, experiments and such technical colour alteration processes as posterisation, it will include a part of the broad collection of self-portraits, photographs on colour film and other never-before-seen or long-forgotten series.
Gunārs Binde. The Muse. 2022. Archival paper, ink print
