Exhibitions

Born in 1926 in Nĕtčice (CZ).
Died in 2011 in Kyjov.
www.tichyocean.com

Miroslav Tichý studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague before embarking on a career as a painter influenced by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne and Expressionism. The seizing of power by the Communists in 1948 and military service, from which he returned visibly transformed, encouraged him to return to Kyjov, a small town where his parents lived. Gradually, he closed in on himself, basically living on the fringes of society.  

He began to be interested in photography and made his own camera as well as the necessary development equipment, using materials recycled from glass, cardboard, jam jars, etc. Using these instruments, he would virtually turn into an obsessive photographer of women: woman in a park, woman walking in the street, woman at the edge of the swimming pool, woman from the front, from the back, woman smoking, a group of women. In his approach to his work, he was his own hard task master – as can be seen from the fact that, almost as an instinctive and mechanical reaction, he took about a hundred snaps a day. Rather in the same way as he had done with his photographic equipment, he built his own dark room which is where he developed his own photos, often enhanced with the judicious use of pencil or ball-point. Once again using inexpensive materials, he designed his own frames which he decorated with attractive borders, interlacing, hatching, etc. In the end, he abandoned his work on the corner of a table in his studio, marking an evident disdain for the finished product and leaving these snaps to the ravages of time.  

His highly poetic work reveals a dreamlike and fantasised vision of the woman - a rather vague, sensual and evanescent reality.  

Discovered by the Swiss psychiatrist and “outsider art” specialist Roman Buxbaum in the 1980s, he was presented by Harald Szeemann at the Seville Biennale in 2004 and from then on has enjoyed international recognition.

Miroslav Tichý’s work has featured in numerous monographic exhibitions in Europe. It is represented in prestigious public French, Czech, German, American and other collections and has been studied in various publications.