Miroslav Tichý, ICP/STEIDL
With texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Roman Buxbaum, Nick Cave, Richard Prince and Brian Wallis.
Few stories in the history of photography are as astonishing and as compelling as that of the octogenarian Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy, whose work we present here. With crude homemade cameras fashioned out of cardboard and duct tape, Tichy took several thousand pictures of the women of his Moravian hometown of Kyjov throughout the 1960s and ’70s. These pictures of women going about their daily business are at once banal and extraordinary, since they transform the ordinary moments of work and leisure into small epiphanies. Sunbathing teenagers and distracted shoppers become Tichy’s odalisques and madonnas, their images sometimes embellished with hand-drawn cardboard frames. Blurred and off-kilter, his photographs have a striking contemporaneity, resembling the early paintings of Gerhard Richter or the photographs of Sigmar Polke.
At the same time, being printed imperfectly and deliberately battered, they evince a surprising retrograde or even antimod-ernist feeling, which, in the context of the Cold War atmosphere of provincial Czechoslovakia, just before and after the liberalizing moment of the Prague Spring (1968), undoubtedly constituted a kind of oblique political provocation, a nose-thumbing response to the progressive realist perfectionism of official Soviet culture.
Tichy was initially dismissed as a madman or outsider, and with his shaggy beard and matted overcoat he certainly dressed the part. He was ailed and persecuted, and, ultimately, he became something of a recluse. More recently, his work has gained widespread recognition. In 2004, the late Harald Szeemann presented the work at the Seville Biennial, and later that year Tichy was honoured with the Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, France. Since then, retrospective exhibitions have been held at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and much of Tichy’s work has been preserved by the Foundation Tichy Ocean.
We at the International Center of Photography are pleased and honoured to organise the first North American survey of the photographs of Miroslav Tichy. In doing so, we offer our greatest thanks to the artist himself, both for having created such compelling works and for letting us show them here. For all of their enthusiastic assistance and meticulous dedication to this project, we also thank Roman Buxbaum and the staff of the Foundation Tichy Ocean, especially Petr Cenkl, Christophe Guye, and Petra Lossen.
This exhibition would not have happened were it not for the inspired suggestion and ongoing support of William von Muffling, Vice President of the Board of Trustees. Frank Arisman deserves our thanks once again for introducing us to Michael Hoppen of the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, an early and steadfast supporter of Tichy’s work. Howard Greenberg, who represents the work in New York, has also been helpful with arrangements.
At ICP, I would like to thank, first and foremost, our Chief Curator Brian Wallis whose keen insight into the works of Miroslav Tichy has made this an intelligent and meaningful book and exhibition. We also appreciate the efforts of Exhibition Assistants Martine Neider and Africa Heiderhoff and Curatorial Assistant Judy Diner for their work on this exhibition. Alicia Cheng of mgmt masterfully designed the exhibition installation.
Production Manager Todd McDaniel and Preparator Maanik Chauhan skillfully supervised the installation and Registrars Barbara Woytowicz and Karen Ostrom deftly managed the shipping and handling of the fragile works. I would also like to thank our Deputy Director for External Affairs Colleen Russell Criste for her diligent efforts to raise funds and to promote this exhibition.
For this publication, we extend our particular thanks to the authors: Richard Prince, Nick Cave, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Roman Buxbaum, and Brian Wallis. As always, Philomena Mariani, our Director of Publications, brilliantly supervised the production of this publication, and we thank her for her contributions.
She worked with the Zürich design studio NORM. We also appreciate the close attention of our copublisher Gerhard Steidl of Steidl Verlag.
Willis Hartshorn
Ehrenkranz Director
