Miroslav Tichý

Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichý

Photographs: Miroslav Tichy

Text: Harald Szeemann and Roman Buxbaum

Publisher: Tichy Ocean Foundation

128 pages

Year: 2006

Comments: Softcover, 18 x 16 cm, b&w photographs. In very good condition. Text in English.

"One of those incredible stories. A story about blurred, underexposed photos and homemade cameras. A story about the bodies of women photographed by a confessed voyeur, who sneaks a peak through the fence of the public swimming pool to catch a glimpse of the women and who puts up with the ubiquitous fence pattern inscribed on the obscure bodies of his victims by the measures of decency. Maybe one of the weirdest, most touching contributions to the gallery of "bathers" that has sublimated all the longing for bodies in the history of Western art. The incredible story also has its rift, the rupture that simply occurs without a cause. Miroslav Tichv is not a naive. He had studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague and was an avant-garde painter in the Fifties, not without risk in Communist Czechoslovakia. He was jailed several times as a social pariah in the eyes of the regime, yet he also had admirers. Until it simply happened: the rift, the rupture, becoming an outcast, somebody who belongs nowhere. For a while, Tichy kept on painting, he built his first camera, refining the prototype depending on what he could scavenge. Ever since, he has been hunting, taking pictures of what he used to paint: women. What should we call that here, in the context of art? The breakthrough of an impulse? Obsession? The art of a misfit? What should we call pictures, whose artist remains unknown, hidden in subcon-sciousness? The incredible story takes place deep down inside, and yet far out, in a dimension for which we have no category of explanation, of comprehension, or even of description."

- Book foreword by Harald Szeemann, 2004