VILNIUS.- The National Gallery of Art of the LNMA hosts an exhibition David Goldblatt: (In)visible Structures by the world-famous photographer of the 2nd half of the 20th century, master of social documentary photography David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018). The exhibition features over a hundred photographic images selected by Karolina Ziębińska to provide an all-inclusive perspective of Goldblatt’s oeuvre. The selection at the NGA includes images from the artist’s main series, such as On the Mines, Some Afrikaners Photographed, Boksburg, Soweto and Structures. The artist’s work in on view in Lithuania for the first time. The exhibition will run until 9 February 2025.

“The retrospective of David Goldblatt’s photography is another highly ambitions initiative by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. Alongside with the other international events of recent years launched by the LNMA in Lithuania and abroad, it puts prominently our name on the international map of museums. I am grateful to the partners of the event and to the professional team of the National Gallery of Art for the opening in Vilnius, of an exhibition of the internationally acclaimed virtuoso of photography, who pronounces humanist values and reminds of the costs of disregarding them,” Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA, is enthusiatic about the event.

“The National Gallery of Art of the LNMA takes pride in the opportunity to introduce the viewer of Lithuania and its visitors to the most significant part of Goldblatt’s works brought to Lithuania from the Republic of South Africa. It is a unique opportunity to get to see the original prints and to hear the artist talk about these images. When the world’s art community is shifting towards non-Western modern and contemporary art, this exhibition addresses in with a relevant these days post-colonial voice. We appreciate a very fruitful collaboration with Poland-based curator Karolina Ziębińska, a connoisseur of the photographer’s work and curator of his exhibition in Paris for the Centre Pompidou, also with Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg; we are grateful to David Goldblatt’s family for the support of our project. In 2015, when visiting Lithuania, Goldblatt visited the National Gallery of Art as well, at that time we discussed the possibility of his exhibition in Vilnius. It is great that it did happen,” Dr Jolita Jablonskienė, director of the National Gallery of Art says.

An important part of the world’s photographic legacy

“Reality mysteriously attracts me. It is exciting, provoking, tempting. I want to touch it, to get to experience it and to see it in its highest intensity and richness. Not for the sake of having it, of making it my own, of colonizing or making use of it, but for getting to its very core and evoking it in photography,” the artist thus described his intent.

Art critics characterize his photography as showing social empathy and political awareness. The artist created a record in images of the apartheid – state policy of racial discrimination and segregation. His work is esteemed as a significant part of 20th-century world photographic legacy.

The exhibition David Goldblatt (In)visible Structures offers to its visitors a monumental series Structures, which he started in 1983, to work on it for over three decades. Within this series, some of the visual history images picture South African public spaces and landscapes with a lingering memory from its colonial past. The photographer expects the viewer’s attentiveness and invites to consider some purely practical functions of different structures, noting also some other form-defining aspects, the values that underpin them, and possibly ensuing consequences, he calls to reflect on how the emergence of such structures may influence entire communities. According to the artist, the environment we create by architecture or similar structural elements, “eloquently articulates our needs, inclinations, whims and values”.

The exhibition also presents the first acclaim-winning photography series by Goldblatt. Though he started shooting as a teenager, he did not embark on a professional career until he was 33, when he worked for different corporations and magazines, also dedicating time to his personal creative pursuits in photography. In his first mature series On the Mines, started in 1947, Goldblatt focused his lens on the gold mining industry, the staple of South African economy nearly throughout the 20th century. His 1968 series Some Afrikaners Photographed records the mundanity of South Africa’s white population, mostly those settled in villages, and frequently leading a poor life. In a decade’s time, the artist shifted his focus to the black residents of Soweto township on southwestern margins of Johannesburg, shaped by the harshest segregation principle in South Africa. Later on, he recorded the life of the middle-class white community of Boksburg, a gold miners’ township close to Johannesburg.

“Each of the photographer’s series gives people a central position, Goldblatt captures them in their home setting, shaped by them and also a shaping force of them. Instead of resorting to a confrontational rhetoric of documentary photography, the artist assumes an apparently neutral observer perspective, which, however, implies a strict social critique,” Karolina Ziębińska, exhibition curator, notes.

The connection to Lithuania

The internationally acclaimed artist had an ancestral link to Lithuania: in the late 19th century, his Litvak grandparents lived in Lithuania, Papilės township in the region of Akmenė. Led by destitution and for fear of persecutions, they emigrated to settle in South Africa.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter a photograph from 2015, taken by Goldblatt when the artist with his family visited his ancestors’ native places in Lithuania and Latvia. It shows a memorial rock, immortalizing the killing of 50 Jewish people and five Lithuanians in the forest of Papilė.

The exhibition closes with a photograph of another rock – of Willem Boshoff’s piece Thinking Stone, sculpted on the campus of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. The consequences of 46-year apartheid and its harsh racial segregation are still to be felt there. The sculpture project was undertaken in the hope that it is possible to create a community of great diversity, yet at the same time, with a sense of unity.

David Goldblatt holds top world accolades, the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievements among them. His art was featured by the leading world art institutions, the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum NYC, and MoMA among them.

The exhibition is organised in partnership with Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg) that helps the artist’s family with the protection of David Goldblatt’s creative legacy and its international dissemination.

The exhibition is accompanied by a special programme of events and education evolutions implemented by the NGA together with Artscape and Sienos Grupe.

The retrospective David Goldblatt (In)visible Structures runs at the National Gallery of Art of the LNMA concurrently with an exhibition by Pranas Domšaitis, a Lithuanian emigre artist who produced his late artwork in South Africa.