Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
Photography is something concrete, a perception, what you see with your eyes. And it happens so fast that you may not see anything at all! To photograph is to paint with light! The flaws are part of it. That's what makes the poetry. And for that you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world! Miroslav Tichy, excerpted from Dedicated to The Women of Kyjov, published by Walther König.
Born in 1926, the reclusive Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý did not become known outside of the small Moravian town of Kyjov until he was 75 years old, when he was included in the 2004 Seville Biennial by the eminent curator, Harald Szeemann. Since that time, he has garnered shows at such major international venues as the International Center of Photography in New York, where his 2010 retrospective was widely reviewed. Working with remarkably primitive looking home-made cameras and developing materials, Tichy is famed for his blurry, erotic images of local women going about their daily business oblivious of his gaze.
Published by Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Edited by Andreas Bee, Susanne Gaensheimer, Udo Kittelmann, Bianca Knall. Text by Andreas Bee, Jana Hebnarová.
The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt staged Miroslav Tichy's (1926–2011) first solo exhibition in Germany in 2003, just after his photographs were rediscovered, and quickly built the largest public collection of his work, including 85 photographs and 4 sketches. Selections from this important collection are published in this volume, along with photographs of the artist in his ragged clothing taken by Petr Kozanek between 1965 and 1985.
In the 1960s, Miroslav Tichy (born 1926) began to take photographs of local women in his home town of Kyjov, Moravia, using cameras he made out of scrap. Quietly and surreptitiously working away over the decades, he was discovered by the photo-community in 2004. This volume provides an affordable introduction to his elusive and voyeuristic work.
Hounded by the Czech Communist regime in the 1960s, the controversial photographer Miroslav Tich? (born 1926) has today found acclaim for his photographs of women taken with homemade cameras. This handsomely produced Tich? monograph is unique among Tichy publications for two reasons: firstly because the photographs, drawn from private collections, are all previously unpublished; and secondly because it is conceived and authored by the Italian former Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, who has likewise come into conflict with state authorities, having been deported from France and Italy several times for his work with Guy Debord. The bulk of the photographs in this volume are derived from Sanguinetti's Tich? collection, and are prefaced with a lengthy meditation on the photographer by Sanguinetti, who declares his admiration for Tich?'s personal and artistic disregard for social conventions, and the anti-modernist character of his methods and materials.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Clint Burnham, Roman Buxbaum, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Harald Szeemann.
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy, born in 1926 in the former Czechoslovakia, withdrew to a life of isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s, he stopped painting and, during his daily walks, began to take photographs of women with cameras he made by hand. He mounted his prints on handmade frames and added finishing touches in pencil, shifting from photography to drawing. Disregarding the rules of photography, for four decades Tichy created a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of female beauty.
A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Text by Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Roman Buxbaum, Adi Hoesle, Michael Stavaric.
Miroslav Tichy, born in a small Czech village in 1926, was a trained artist with a background in painting and drawing and a 30-year career as photographer (specializing in unauthorized, low-grade pictures of local women--on the streets or in the pool--made with jury-rigged cameras of his own design) when he abruptly ended his artistic production in 1990. Since then, he has avoided the public eye and generally refused to sell his artworks. In this volume, more than 30 contemporary artists contribute works in response to Tichy's: among them we find photographs of alpine snowboarders by Walter Niedermayr, an erotic drawing by Arnulf Rainer, an enigmatic sculptural work and a drawing of a gallerist standing on an artist's head by Erwin Wurm, a hand-drawn score by Michael Nyman, collaged works by Jonathan Meese, a large round acrylic painting by Katharina Grosse, a Surrealistic photo series by Anna and Bernhard Blume, a kittenish diptych by Fischli and Weiss and sundry dark and mysterious works by Thomas Ruff, Andro Wekua and others. The original Tichy images featured here are gorgeous, enigmatic and erotic, and are accompanied by portraits of the artist and his fascinating DIY cameras.
Published by Torst. Essays by Roman Buxbaum, Pavel Vancat and Harald Szeemann.
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, and working--at some risk--as an abstract painter in Communist Czechoslovakia, Miroslav Tichy turned to a life in isolation in his home town of Kyjov, Moravia. In his fourth decade, in the 1960s, he began to take photographs of local women at the town pool using cameras he made by hand out of scrap and peering through the fence, which imposed its lines on every image. His is one of those incredible stories: Tischy is a driven, fiercely private artist with a large body of work that the world might easily never have seen. But in this case the story ends with the receipt of the Arles Recontres de la Photographie Discovery Award in 2005. Or rather it keeps going, with this collection, among the strangest, most touching contributions ever made to Western art's gallery of bathers.
Miroslav Tichy
Miroslav Tichy: Form of Truth
Miroslav Tichy: Dedicated to The Women of Kyjov
Artists for Tichy - Tichy for Artists
Miroslav Tichy