ZURICH.- In the first solo show in Switzerland since the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2005, approximately 35 works by Miroslav Tichý are being shown until the first days of September. Additional works are available. Czech artist Miroslav Tichý, born in 1926, holds a unique position in the history of 20th century art and photography. He died in April 2011 in the Czech city of Kyjov. All photographs displayed in this commemorative exhibition, as well as all additional works available from Galerie Walter Kellerin’s stock, were directly acquired from Tichý’s sole heir of all property rights, Jana Hebnarova. The gallery also informed that Mrs. Hebnarova will continue to work with the gallery on the basis of exclusivity. 
For more than thirty years – that is, until the late 1980s – he lived a life of personal and cultural isolation, but took dozens of photographs every day, his great subject being the women of the town.
Miroslav Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s to 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware they are being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted him, perhaps not realizing that the parody of a camera he carried was real.
His soft focus, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed — flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections. Of his technical methods, he has said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.
His deliberately marginal and fiercely nonconformist way of life, so little in accord with the ideology of the day, led to repeated run-ins with the authorities, leading to several periods of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the Sixties and Seventies, and to his losing his studio in 1972.
His images, shot instinctively or carelessly on his handmade cameras with their makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women at the swimming-pool, women in the street, women indoors, women on the TV screen: these are his single, obsessional subject. Enlarged and printed on his own improvised equipment, the photographs were then often retouched before being mounted and framed using such materials as old newspaper and cardboard before, sometimes, being put away and forgotten for years. Over- or under-exposed, scratched, blurred, torn, and spotted, they nonetheless reveal an uncategorizable artist, whose methods recall those of the amateur or the naivety of outsider art, but whose images are strongly marked by influences from the classical pictorial tradition. With its endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of its production, his work also has affinities with many procedures of the contemporary art of the same period.
Following the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, private property was nationalized. In 1972, Tichý was evicted from his studio, his work thrown into the street. He stopped drawing and painting and concentrated only on photography, working in the disorderly conditions of his home. Of the transition, he says, “The paintings were already painted, the drawings drawn. What was I supposed to do? I looked for new media. With the help of photography I saw everything in a new light. It was a new world.”
