ZURICH, SWITZERLAND.-The Kunsthaus Zürich has become the first art museum to show the extraordinary photographs of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichý (*1926). Having chosen to live away from cultural and social centres, between 1960 and 1990 Tichý – exclusively using home-made cameras – created a highly original photographic œuvre of astonishing formal quality. His subject matter: the appeal of the female form.

Around 110 works by Miroslav Tichý from 1960 to 1990 will be brought together in the Kunsthaus Zürich. This is Tichý’s first solo exhibition. The curator of this presentation is Tobia Bezzola. Since his birth in 1926, Tichý has lived in a small town in Moravia. Having studied at the Academy of Art in Prague, in the late 1940s he set out on a highly promising career producing paintings and drawings. However, personal experience and the totalitarian regime soon alienated him from official art and culture. So Tichý turned to photography.

MOTIFS AND METHODS - Tichý made most of his photographic equipment himself – with great skill and fantasy – from tins, spectacle lenses and wooden boxes. Over the decades Tichý took more than 100 photographs per day. However, his methods were hardly in keeping with conventional artistic practice. Instead he used his cameras to record the daily round of the female population of his native town. Thus he produced thousands of photographs of women: women at the market, at the swimming pool, at work, in pubs, in the streets and public squares. Then, using his own home-made enlarging equipment, he would meticulously select details and rework the prints, sometimes even by hand, colouring or retouching them and, for some of them, creating individual hand-cut, painted passepartouts.

The fact that Tichý constructed, with his own hands, all of his photographic equipment (with the sole exception of the films) from the simplest of materials, as it were inventing photography again for himself, was in part simply a material necessity. At the same time it also demonstrates his utter determination to achieve full artistic autonomy despite the totalitarian society in which he lived and which greeted his creativity with indifference or even scorn.

DOCUMENTED ON FILM - Tichý’s onetime neighbour, the artist and psychiatrist Roman Buxbaum, who now lives in Zurich, has documented Tichý’s life in photographs and film for the past 20 years; he is currently preparing a film portrait of the artist which will receive its premiere at the exhibition.