My father through my grandfather's eyes

Galeria Wschód is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Copenhagen-based visual artist Anton Munar. Titled My father through my grandfather’s eyes, the exhibition gathers recent paintings coupled with archival photographs from the artist’s family collection. All photographs capture the artist’s father and were taken by his grandfather between 1972 – 1978.

Anton Munar (b. 1997, Copenhagen) lives and works between Copenhagen and Mallorca. He is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art in London (2017) and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2023). His works were previously exhibited across Amsterdam, Seoul, Los Angeles, New York, Copenhagen, London, Kyoto, and Thirsk, amongst others.

Munar’s practice involves a wide range of materials including oil, charcoal, distemper, gouache, ink, and pastel, applied on either canvas, linen or wood. Through the application of rich layers of paint, he builds up evocative compositions at the confluence of fragmented narratives drawn from the driving force of love, where interior and exterior spaces intertwine and where poetic visions infiltrate the physical world.

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My father through my grandfather’s eyes is a way of saying: now, now we are alive.

My grandfather Ejnar Kristian Møller is the father to my father. There’s nothing particularly special about 

this, but what is life really, if not this very simple logic of time, generations, love, and time again.

Time itself exists in mysterious ways, often stretching itself over nearly eternal lengths, endless and full

of weight. Or as the quick jolt and accelerated joy of letting time simply flow through life. In my eyes pho-

tography is the medium where both converge.

A quick action, an even intuitive after-thought takes place, the shutter opens and closes, with all the pho-

tographs you see in this exhibition – this happened. The capturing of a moment in time. A moment from

when I hadn’t been born, when my father was a son, and when my grandfather would develop photos in

a small dark room located in the basement of their family home.

After work, after dinner, the kids are asleep, a time of one’s own, cropping and selecting which scans of

light should be held in time. Art can at times be so insistent on the magnification of something, even of

that which is rather simple and banal, but I see that it is here that life is held.

When I ask my grandfather about his photography he speaks of intuition, always insistent on wanting not

to be seen by his subject, a voyeur. Even his photographs of nature carry a kind of intimate distance, the

intimacy of the desire of wanting to be like a fly in the wall, to catch something real. Can we catch life?

For me, trying is enough, and the act of making would be empty if we could really catch a moment in our

life. The act is all we have. The act of choosing which photos to bring to life; a physical process, images

becoming a part of the world, their paper able to be held. However thin photographs are, their weight

emotionally is undeniable. The very touch that takes place in the sensitive doings of a darkroom, moves

me deeply.

I myself am becoming a father this June and I’ll never meet my father only as a son. I was struck by this

impossibility, and I love it. These photographs hold the space shared by my father and grandfather, and

I – from this outside position of not being anywhere close to alive when they were taken – selected seven

photographs, moments of light, bodies and air, these bodies are my family. This, all that you see not only

in these photographs but in this life: won’t happen again.

Tak bedstefar, tak far.

(from Danish: Thank you grandpa, thank you dad)