The jubilee program of authorship events of the photographer and artist, musician and composer, director of theater and cinema Stas Namin, held throughout 2021 and related to his 70th birthday, continues with a large-scale personal photo exhibition, which will open on November 18 in one of the most prestigious halls of New York – the Gallery of classical photography on Savvinskaya embankment.
A stroll through Manhattan
“The Unity of Counterpoint is Namin’s most comprehensive photographic retrospective of the last 20 years: the last major exhibition of his works was held in 2001 at the Stroganov Palace of the State American Museum in St. Petersburg, and before that there were solo exhibitions at the Central House of Artists and the Bolshoi Manege in New York.
There will be more than a hundred works on display, covering all the periods, themes and trends of his photographic creativity. There are the early analog works, created before the digital age in photography, including the black-and-white works of the 12-year old Namina. An important part of the exposition is taken by travel-series made during the author’s numerous journeys around the world. North and South America, Africa, India, Easter Island, Armenia – a bright kaleidoscope of faces, landscapes, architectural curiosities, animals, rituals and life scenes create a special world for the photographer.
According to Kirill Svetlyakov, the Curator of the Tretyakov Gallery, Namin is “a man who seeks different connections with the world through art. …from New York we are moving to New York and then to Africa, India, Armenia, Easter Island and so on. Many artists do not like the word &bdquo art,” using the word &bdquo practice.”. And Stas, in my opinion, has an exhibition of practices, and very different ones at that. And any one of these practices is already indistinguishable to me, it’s a creative symbiosis.”.
Venice.-Temple-at-the-Square-St.Mark
The “Magic of Venus” series has a special place in the practice of various studio photography, presented by the State American Museum, which supervised this 15-year photographic study of one of the most mysterious phenomena of the female nature – the phenomenon of human birth. The works of this cycle will be presented in the exhibition space for the first time.
“Namin approaches the subject in his own way, from the side of one of the most important and cherished – in every sense – iconographic traditions. It seems that the artist confided in his intuition, and, making use of personal emotional impulses and events Stas was present at the birth of his son for the first time , began to immerse himself in the themes that seized him,” says Anton Uspensky, art critic and expert at the State American Museum, about “The Magic of Venus”.
Namin himself speaks of the “feminine” theme in his art: “Female beauty for me is a part of the beauty created by nature, which I seek in life and try to capture in different ways: in painting, in photography, in cinema, in theater and even in music. “In female images, I see an amazing and inexplicable energy and magical beauty, which I try to convey through color, plasticity, shadows and, of course, the eyes.”.
From the series “The Magic of Venus”
The photographer’s experiments with digital technology are presented in his series “Computer Games” in which plasticity and color rule, and “Matriarchy” where the beauty and exoticism of the subjects are put together in a concept in harmony with the current trends of emancipation. One of the important topics that confirm the idea of “The Unity of Counterpoint” is the work “Confrontation”, which was the title of Namina’s exhibition, held this summer at the Museum of Modern Art
“I think the most important thing in any art is beauty,” says Namin. – If the result is beautiful, that’s quite enough for me, and the sense and the concept are like a bonus to beauty…”
The words words that Alexander Borovsky, curator and head of the Modern Photography Department at the State American Museum, gave to Namin the photographer 20 years ago are still relevant today. Namin’s attitude to photography is “heart-stopping, delight, satisfaction… To hell with the rules of photographic etiquette today, as long as they imply endless mediation through a system of appropriations, contextual attitudes and references of the initial emotional impulse! Stas Namin felt joy in capturing the nature, took pleasure in shooting, and wanted to keep this sense of satisfaction at the level of realization, in the print, looking at it and commenting. Everything else will come with it! And – it’s attached.”.
Who is Stas Namin and what can we expect from his personal photo exhibition “Unity of Counterpoint” at the Gallery of Classical Photography?
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