Solo exhibition. Portraits in photogrpahs "Jānis Deinats. Times. So sweet"
May 26 - July 9


Time leaves its imprints on faces. Individual imprints on each face. This is how portraits are born. Times change. Portraits remain. As interim periods.
There are also times of exposition. The amount of light that appears on faces. The light in a person is captured. Or the absence thereof. Time will tell.
There are creative times, political times, times of upheaval and bad times.
Portraits are never silent, because they reflect the times.


The outstanding photographer Jānis Deinats has been taking photographs since 1989. He is renowned as a distinguished portraitist, but until now there has never really been an exhibition of his portraits.
Jānis Deinats’ photographic portraits are a visual testimony to his age. The exhibition TIMES. SO SWEET will showcase his portraits of over 70 Latvian celebrities, people who are well-known to the public including politicians, sports stars, musicians, poets and actors. However, let’s be honest, this is also an exhibition about forgetting. If a group of young people were to walk into the exhibition today, most of them would ask, who are all these old men and women. But what about in 20 years’ time? These days celebrity quickly turns into anonymity.
The exhibition at the MuseumLV Art Gallery will occupy two floors. One room will be dedicated to the outstanding National Theatre actress Elza Radziņa. This February, while browsing through his archive for images for this exhibition, Jānis Deinats discovered a roll of film that he had shot in the early 1990s, whose emulsion had been damaged during development. He was greatly surprised to discover that the images obtained from this film were of Elza Radziņa. The film itself was produced at the SVEMA Factory in Shostka, Ukraine. Another major surprise was the discovery that Elza Radziņa was actually born in 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine into a Latvian family of refugees seeking safety during the First World War.
A separate room will contain large-scale (130x100m) images. These are fragments of Jānis Deinats’ series of photographs I PHOTOGRAPH REMOTELY and I PHOTOGRAPH. Taken during the COVID -19 pandemic, these series form a testimony to this age and its psychological typology, visually accenting the effect of the “fissure” in social relations, as well as the acutely felt sense of just how small people actually are amidst this new and uncertain “big” world.

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