Antanas Sutkus “Children”

“When Antanas Sutkus depicts the children of Lithuania, he sees them as representing all the children of this world. In his eyes they live on the planet of their own, a place that is almost impossible for adults to understand, or even to experience. The children’s world offers him a glimpse of the entire bandwidth of human emotions – and what’s more, in children these are much more unaffected than in grown-ips. Sutkus finds the immediacy of children’s boredom, absorption, grief, aggression, joy or loving affection life-affirming: “I always tried to make sense of the surrounding world with the help of my camera.”
<…> Antanas Sutkus has always loved people. We see this in his black-and-white images, which show the sum of humanity in all its colorful diversity: humans of all social backgrounds and all ages in their everyday lives. This book brings you the group which the artist still feels like he belongs to, and for whom he has a great deal of devotion: “Children, the masters of the universe.”

Thomas Schirmböck