Miroslav Tichy

Untitled, MT Inv. No 10-1-96 – Miroslav Tichy, Woman, Czech, Photography

Unknown, ca. 1970-1990

Tichý is truly one of the great ‘finds’ of an unknown artist who worked on the outside edges of the art world. Born in 1926, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the late ‘40s and produced figurative paintings that were, apparently, of a vaguely modernist character. Alienated from the prevailing Communist regime, he turned his back on the official art world and withdrew to a life in isolation to live quietly and poorly in the small Moravian town near Brno where he was born. His generally nonconformist way of life led to run-ins with the authorities; following the communist takeover Tichý spent some eight years in prison camps and jails for no particular reason other than he was ‘different’ and was considered subversive. Upon his release in the early 70’s, Tichý wandered his small town in rags, pursuing his obsession as an artist with the female form by photographing in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, and other junk he found on the street - even his lenses were cut from Plexiglas or children’s spectacle lenses and polished with a mixture of toothpaste and ashes.. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. For a long time, Tichý was something between a charming oddity and a local bogeyman. He was frequently arrested for hanging around the local pool and snapping pictures of unsuspecting women. The fact that this was all occurring under an oppressive Communist regime added a certain air of rebellion to the proceedings, whether or not he intended it. With time, the locals grew accustomed to his presence and would often welcome having their photos taken. Tichý, practically reinventing photography from scratch, reconstitutes pictorialism along with it, and not as a distortion of the medium but as something like its essence. 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 delimitation of the results via cropping and framing. Marginal and exceptionally voyeuristic, in his methods Tichý could be described as an “art brut photographer” yet he is also marked by classical influences. Though his images are produced with poor-quality equipment and carelessly shot, they offer an idiosyncratic and almost hallucinatory vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality. With his endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of his production, Tichý’s work draws many parallels to certain practices of conceptual art during the same period.