Untitled

Executed between 1950 and 1980, Miroslav Tichy's photographs offer a tender portrait of local women living in Kyjov, Moravia in the Czech Republic under the Soviet Union. Created using the artist's own makeshift, improvised cameras, the untitled photographs depict women in intimate postures, partially dressed in braziers and bathing suits. Walking around town, Tichy captured his images like a latter-day August Sander, documenting each and every instance of delicate, feminine beauty he encountered. The photographs themselves radiate with a dreamlike nostalgia reminiscent of the somehow wistful grisaille, photo-realist paintings carried out by Gerhard Richter during the same period. For each photograph, Tichy himself has added manual, finishing touches to their surfaces: outlines of the body and hand-drawn frames using felt tip pen and graphite. In doing so, he transforms the work from photograph to drawing; the opposite end to Richter's own artistic spectrum. It is a unique and unconventional practice that has since become Tichy's signature. As the curator of the artist's first American solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography aptly concluded, 'Mr. Tichy [was] a Baudelairean flneur who thrived on chance encounters in the city, and an anti-modernist who reversed centuries of photographic progress' (B. Wallis quoted in K. Rosenburg, 'An Ogling Subversive with a Homemade Camera', The New York Times, 11th February 2010, [28/02/12]). Little known until his exhibition at the Seville Biennial curated by Harald Szeemann in 2004, Tichy passed away in 2011 and it is posthumously that his important contribution to twentieth century photography is to be recognised.