Siboney

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 Suvre.

During many years Tichý wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children's spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.

Tichy’s working methods have little to do with conventional artistic praxis. His camera at the ready, he would observe the daily round of the female population of his native town, in a matter of seconds snapping shots from his hip, and instantly concealing the strange device again. The result of those forays are shots of women at the market, in the swimming pool, at work, in pubs, in the streets and public squares...