Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 26 x 12,5 cm
Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 14,2 x 17,9 cm
Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 23,8 x 11,5 cm
Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 26 x 9 cm
Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 20 x 12 cm
Untitled, 1970s / b/w photograph / 17,8 x 12 cm
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The genesis of Miroslav Tichý's (b.1926) remarkable photographic works was in the little town of Kyjov, southern Moravia. Dissapointed by the rejection of his works and rising state sensorship, Tichý abandoned his formal studies of drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague shortly after the Communist take over in 1948. He returned home to live a life of artistic solitude, focusing instead on his favorite motif, women. Over the next thirty years, with homemade cameras in hand, Tichý managed to produce a body of unique mixed media works, that yielded not only his perchant for voyeuristic fantasy, abstraction and embellishment, but also an innate understanding of the painterly potential locked with in the photographic medium.
For the majority of his life, Tichýs works went completely unnoticed by the public. Though his work was produced in a small town locked behind the iron curtain, it was more Tichýs Diogenian way of life that kept him an outsider artist. As such, his works speak from a shockingly non-postmodern perspective. Unaffected, unabashed and daringly non-self referential, his entire oeuvre is completely unique in terms of concept, atmosphere, and content. There is no comparable category in contemporary photography.