BE THERE
Miroslav Tichý 2008Presented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery February 16, 2008- March 15, 2008Reception: February 16, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pmMiroslav Tichý
Born in 1926, Miroslav Tichý spent close to three decades (1960s-90s) in a small Moravian hometown working outside the conventions of contemporary art to create an incredibly compelling, experimental body of photographic work. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the 40s, Tichý was soon alienated by the political regimes of the time in Czechloslovakia. At some point in the 50s, he moved away from the avant-garde paintings of his student years and, as Barry Scwhabsky writes in his 2005 Artforum review of Tichy’s first major museum exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich, ‘practically reinvented photography from scratch.’ Using self-made cameras, constructed from tin cans, bottle caps and plastic, Tichý captured the poetry of everyday life in photographic images. Making only one print from each negative, Tichý created compositions featuring mainly anonymous female characters who lent themselves unwittingly to his practice. Taking mothers, students, waitresses and others as his live models, situated on park benches, sunbathing, or even on TV screens, these intimately scaled black and white prints often feature hand-drawn details and a washy, mottled print quality. Some of the works feature elaborate ink or watercolor, cardboard framing elements. The resulting works fall dynamically between painting and photography, between image and object, embracing chance, and time in a unique process of presentation and production. While Tichý certainly employed the representational nature of photography, and exploits the inherent voyeurism of the medium, his works transcend the limitations of film as documentary tool. Again, from Schwabsky’s Artforum piece, “What counts for him is not only the image- just one moment in the photographic process- but also the chemical activity of the materials, which is never entirely stable or complete, and the delimination of the results via cropping and framing. Tichý makes all these aspects visible through their imperfection, not unlike the scratching, clotting, and smearing that Roland Barthes identified as Cy Twombly’s way of making matter ‘appear’ (in the sense of taking the stage) in his paintings.” A major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2005, has been followed by several important international exhibitions including a current solo show at Magasin 3 in Stockholm, and upcoming solo shows at the Museum for Modern Kunst in Frankfurt, as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Tichý will also be featured in the upcoming Biennale of Sydney, at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, KUB Billboards, Miroslav Tichý, 23th of March - 1th of June 2008 ; the National Gallery of Czech Republic: International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Opening June 2, 2008; Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin: solo show, opening November 21, 2008 (through January 22, 2009).
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