Miroslav Tichý

1926-2011 · Kyjov, Czech Republic

A trained painter who refused Socialist Realism, retreated to his home town, and shot thousands of blurred, furtive photographs on cameras he built from cardboard tubes and polished Plexiglas.

The life

Tichý was born in 1926 in Kyjov, Moravia, and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague until the 1948 Communist takeover imposed Socialist Realism, which he refused. He returned to Kyjov, grew reclusive and unkempt, and was repeatedly arrested and institutionalised by a regime that found his nonconformity intolerable; his studio was confiscated in 1972. From the 1960s to 1985 he photographed daily on home-made equipment, then piled the prints up carelessly at home. His former neighbour Roman Buxbaum began preserving the work in 1981, and a 2004 Seville Biennial showing brought late fame: Kunsthaus Zürich in 2005, the Pompidou in 2008. He died in Kyjov in 2011.

The work

Soft, ghostly gelatin silver prints of the women of Kyjov, sunbathing, shopping, walking, mostly unaware they were photographed, which gives the work an unresolved and uncomfortable voyeuristic charge that any honest viewing has to sit with. He shot up to 90 frames a day on cameras of cardboard, tin cans and hand-polished Plexiglas lenses, finished prints with pencil, and mounted them on hand-decorated card. Work is held by the Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA and the V&A. If you want to be famous, he said, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.

Why we love them

The home-made cameras are among the most moving objects in outsider art: optics built from rubbish that outperformed a police state’s entire idea of what art was allowed to be. The pictures ask hard questions about looking, and we do not look away from that either.

Go deeper

• Miroslav Tichý at the Outsider Art Fair
• Miroslav Tichý on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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