Exhibition Quiet Stories

We invite you to the exhibition of prof. Vladimír Birgus entitled Quiet Stories at the Czech Centre in Bratislava.

Vladimír Birgus is a professor at the Institute of Creative Photography, Faculty of Philosophy and Natural Sciences, University of Silesia in Opava. He has presented his work at more than sixty exhibitions around the world (e.g. in Prague, Brno, Ostrava, Olomouc, Plzeň, Pardubice, Bratislava, Warsaw, Poznań, Wrocław, Kraków, Katowice, Vilnius, Amsterdam, Salzburg, Berlin, Munich, Eisenach, Paris, Tours, Moscow, Kiev, Zagreb, Novigrad).

His photographs are part of the collections of e.g. Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Museum of Art in Olomouc, East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice, Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Silesian Museum in Katowice, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, European House of Photography and the National Library in Paris, the Museum of Photographic Art in Odense, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and others.

As early as the early 1980s, Vladimír Birgus was one of the first Czech photographers to thoughtfully exploit the emotional and psychological effects of colour in subjectively conceived documentary images that were created in parallel with his black-and-white works.

Initially, he emphasised the strong contrasts of several saturated colours. His more recent photographs, however, are often almost monochromatic and often dominated by only one dominant colour, as in the Bratislava exhibition with its dominant red and blue.

The large areas of a single colour contribute to giving the images unrealistic elements that resemble abstract painting rather than an unmanipulated image of reality. Increasingly evident is the gradual shift from socially oriented themes to a highly subjective conception of documentary. The refinement of the depiction is the result of the author’s particular view of unmanipulated reality. Vladimír Birgus does not limit himself and relies on discovering phantasmal moments of seemingly ordinary scenes, in which the real and the surreal merge. In the many confrontations of people with their environment or in their reactions to various coexisting stories, the author alienates the micro-stories of human existence.

The plot is thus opened up in terms of meaning to a broader picture plan, and the light atmosphere enhances the overall composition. If we follow Vladimír Birgus’s subjective images, we are also reading a story about contemporary globalised society, about loneliness in the midst of the crowd and about the author’s own feelings. The refinement of the depicted events is the result of looking at an unmanipulated reality.

Curator, art critic and filmmaker Martin Dostál has written about Birgus’ photographs: “From the beginning, Birgus’s colour configurations worked with colour in a deliberate and almost painterly way. His appealing scenes, which are close to staged modulation even if they are not, were conceived with colour and specific light in mind, which supports the colour and plasticity of the images.

Red and Blue, an almost Stendhal-esque paraphrase of the title, draws us into the photographic action to such an extent that its viewer becomes another actor, when he or she is not in the least indifferent to what is happening in the photograph. Colour, and in Birgus’s case this is almost an exemplary example, expands the mental field of the image. Time is stretched a little, colour is not rushed, ingredients come into play that a black and white narrative rarely includes or would be banal and uninteresting in its rendering. At the same time, the photogenic nature of the colour scenes evokes a greater sense of staging, of unreality, of apparent paradox, since the truth of colour should be more complex.

I think Birgus works with all of this, he knows the effect that colour has on an emotional and compositional level. He doesn’t push the saw – he resisted that in his black and white opuses. He can both empty and thicken the frame, but in both cases he remains visually intense and communicative. There can be many dots, or rather hints of them. He likes to “compose” in plans, the geometry of shadows comes into play, surfaces are important. Surfaces naturally divide and create space, and we sometimes wonder if this is no longer about abstracting hints, about emptying and the autonomy of the colour statement.”

While visual perception is immediate, we have to make a greater effort to mentally decipher what we observe. Birgus’s photographs are accompanied by only brief information about the year and place of their creation; the various ways of interpreting them depend entirely on the viewer and their willingness to mentally engage.

As the years go by, Vladimír Birgus’s photographs are increasingly accompanied by the motif of melancholy and the principle of counterpoint, the pursuit of surrealism of impressive scenery, as well as the application of metaphor and symbolism. In many confrontations of people with their environment or in reactions to various coexisting stories, exposed in a split second in the scenery of the lived present, he alienates the micro-stories of human existence. In this way, the plot opens up in meaning to a wider picture plan, and the luminous atmosphere enhances the overall composition. If we follow the subjective images of Vladimír Birgus, we read at the same time a story about contemporary globalized society, about a restless life between reality and dream, but at the same time with the author’s conviction that the world is beautiful.

The author of the text, Václav Podestát, is the curator of the exhibition.

Venue: Gallery of the Czech Centre in the Czech House, Prepoštská 6, Bratislava
Date: 10.11.2024 – 28.02.2025
Open: Tuesday – Friday: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Free entry

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