Miroslav Tichý

Miroslav Tichý was born on 20.11.1926 in Nětčice, a Moravian village in what is now the Czech Republic. As a student of the Academy of Art in Prague, in the late 1940s he embarked on a very promising artistic career, painting and drawing. However, his life changed radically after the Communist takeover. Tichý rebelled, and in the end spent a total of eight years in prison camps and jails. He finds his own freedom elsewhere, as an outsider, off the beaten track – mocked, scorned and ignored. Despite, or perhaps because of, the complete lack of interest and indifference of those around him, despite his cultural and social isolation, in the 1970s and 80s Tichý produced a highly original, formally sophisticated photographic œuvre.
Tichý wandered his town in rags, pursuing his obsession as an artist with the female form by photography with cameras home-made from tin cans, spectacle lenses and other junk, returning home to make prints on equally primitive equipment. He stole intimate glimpses of his subjects through windows and the fences of swimming pools as well as in the streets, often getting into trouble with the police. From hundreds of images he selected just a few details to enlarge, often drawing intricately on them or reworking them in other ways, before placing them in individually designed card mounts. The work, which might have been simply intrusive voyeurism, takes on a melancholic and poetic quality.