Miroslav Tichy

1926 - 2011

The blurred, voyeuristic snapshots by the enigmatic Czech-born photographer Miroslav Tichý (1926 - 2011) are legendary and coveted by the art market, critics and museum audiences alike. His late rise to fame in the mid-2000s is considered a unique phenomenon in recent art history.

After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Tichý began a promising career in the late 40s as an up-and-coming avant-garde painter with clear influences by Matisse and the German Expressionists. But the totalitarian imperatives of the socialist regime increasingly began to alienate the young artist, who refused to comply with the official cultural agenda. As the incompatibility between his artistic interests and the impositions by state grows, Tichý moves away increasingly. He becomes an outsider, paying for his autonomy with longer spells in jail and in psychiatric institutions. Tichý turns more and more to photography. His radical antagonism towards the establishment remains consistent even after the iron curtain has come down.

In the early 1990s Galerie Susanne Zander showed photographs by the then rather unknown Miroslav Tichý. Now, another part of the prolific oeuvre that has hereto remained largely unshown and unknown is brought to light in an exhibition that provides new insight and surprising parallels within the artists oeuvre. Both the form and the content in the paintings and drawings on display attest to the artist's recurrent obsessions: the emphasis on selected body parts, the placid eroticism, the cut-up in the composition, the aesthetic of imperfection and of course the subject matter: the female, Tichý's eternal object of desire.

Miroslav Tichý’s works are represented in renowned collections worldwide such as the MMK – Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt/ Main; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the F.C. Gundlach Collection at the Haus der Photographie Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Collection Antoine de Galbert, Paris, and the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, Porto.

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