Exhibition Dates: 28 April – 29 May 2010
A camera of Miroslav Tichy
These are fascinating pictures (and to some extent, even more? Marginal, disturbing, poetic, beautiful, creepy, voyeuristic, misogynistic).
Tichy’s camera is an amazing creation (click on the image above to see a larger version).
Dr. Marcus Bunyan
Many thanks to Jim Edwards and Michael Hoppen Gallery for allowing me to publish the photos in this posting.
“Women are just form to me. Figure – standing, bending, or sitting. Movement, walking. I’m not interested in anything else. Sexuality is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion.”
“Everything is decided by the Earth, which is rotating. You can survive only as long as the Earth rotates. It is predetermined.
,
Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
The recently unknown photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy has become a notable presence in the world of photography and contemporary art over the past few years. Timeless and inseparable, Tichy’s work depicts the women of Kijov, from the artist’s native town in Moravia. On 28 April 2010, the Michael Hoppen Gallery will bring together unique photographs, not previously seen in the UK, made by Tichy in the 1960s with his makeshift cameras and enlargers.
Marginal and exceptionally voyeuristic, Tichy could be described as an “Art Brut photographer” in his methods, yet he is marked by many classical influences. Although his images are created with poor-quality equipment and shot carelessly, they present a strange and almost hallucinatory vision of an imaginary, erotic reality. With his endless return to the same themes and the volume and regularity of his production, Tichy’s work draws many parallels with some of the practices of conceptual art during the same period.
For thirty years Tichy took up to one hundred photographs every day, pursuing his artistic passion for the female form. Dressed in clothing and using a homemade camera, Tichy captured the universe of people in the small town of Brno in the Czech Republic. This discovery of photography saved him from the madness and claustrophobia of political dictatorship. Although his work is widely exhibited today, Tichy worked for years as an unknown artist in complete isolation on the periphery of the art world.
A student at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Tichy left after the Communists’ coup in 1948. Unwilling to submit to the political system he spent almost eight years in prison and psychiatric wards for no reason other than that he was ‘different’ and considered subversive. After his release he became an outdoorsman, and spent his time taking photographs of the women of his home town, using homemade cameras made from tin cans, children’s eyeglass lenses, rubber bands, Scotch tape and other junk found on the streets.
He took photographs of their ankles, faces and torsos while out walking or sunbathing, of girls working in the shop behind the counter, of mothers pushing prams and anyone else who caught his eye, sometimes finding himself in trouble with the police. These little objects of passion, which to the casual observer may seem mere voyeurism, are at once melancholy and poetic.
Tichy’s work came to light in July 2005, when he won the ‘New Discovery Award’ in Arles. Within a year he had already been exhibited in two solo museum exhibitions in Zurich’s Wintertours and Prague’s Rudolfinum, and his work has been purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Tichy has now exhibited in museums from Holland to Canada, Finland to Ireland and Tokyo. In 2009, an original show was held at the Center Pompidou in Paris where it received rave reviews. Since then, Tichy’s work has been exhibited, most recently at ICP in New York the new York Times His work was reviewed as…’extremely fascinating’. American artist Richard Prince wrote an essay for the catalogue. In his typical smart-aleck, red-blooded-guy persona, Prince connects Tichy with Bettie Page, Swanson’s TV dinners, and John Cheever’s short stories. Tichy’s work will also be on view at Tate Modern later this year as part of his Voyeurism, Surveillance and Camera Exhibition in May 2010.
Press release from Michael Hoppen Gallery website [Online] Quoted 21/05/2010 no longer available online
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, November 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011) was a photographer who took thousands of covert photographs of women from the 1960s to 1985 in his hometown of Kyzów in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras made from cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware that they were being photographed. When some people saw Tichy posing for the beauty pageant, perhaps they did not realize that the parody on camera they were carrying was the real thing.
His soft-focus, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyaw are skewed, smeared, and badly printed – flawed due to the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add to the poetic imperfections. Regarding his technical methods, Tichy has said, “First of all, you must have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you have to do something worse than anyone in the whole world.”
During communist rule in Czechoslovakia, Tichy was considered a dissident and was treated poorly by the government. His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was organized for them in 2004. Tichy did not participate in exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and independence from society’s standards. Tichy died on April 12, 2011 in Kyzów, Czech Republic. ,
an essay in Artforum International Tichy has been described as “practically inventing photography from scratch”, rehabilitating the soft-focus, manipulated pictorial photography of the late 1800s.
“…not as a distortion of the medium but as something akin to its essence. What matters to him is not only the image – just a moment in the photographic process – but also the chemical activity of the material, which is never completely stable or complete, and also the delimitation of the results through cropping and framing.”
Radek Horacek, director of the Brno House of Art, who organized an exhibition of Tichy’s photographs in 2006, describes them as follows:
“They all make very careful observations of the Kyaw women and their everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking off a T-shirt in a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this ordinariness a feeling of extravagance and rarity. Just one part of the female body in his photographs can seem very esoteric. There are many magazines that present much more nudity than this. Tichy does but her pictures are different. In her pictures a woman’s trunks or swimming costume looks somewhat mysterious.
text from wikipedia website
Miroslav Tichy – “Tarzan Retires”
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy (Czech, 1926-2011)
untitled
C. 1960s
Unique Silver Gelatin Print
Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery
© Miroslav Tichy
Michael Hoppen Gallery
Unit 10, Pall Mall Deposit
124-128 Barlby Road
London W10 6BL
phone: +44 (0)20 7352 3649
Opening hours:
By appointment only Monday-Friday 9.30am to 6.00pm
Michael Hoppen Gallery website
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