Miroslav Tichý "Sun Screen"
Horton Gallery
This event has ended.
Horton Gallery, Chelsea presents Sun Screen, a solo exhibition of photographs by Czech artist, Miroslav Tichý. The unashamedly voyeuristic photographs in this exhibition, shot with one of the artist’s homemade cameras, feature the traditional subject matter of women bathers.
In the accompanying essay for this exhibition, Allan Doyle writes that Tichý’s photographs of bathing women “evidence a paradoxical coupling of intention and accident.” Doyle writes on the importance of Tichý’s process as a photographer:
Tichý’s technique harkens back to the moment of photography’s birth, particularly bringing to mind the early ‘sun pictures’ of the inventor of the medium, Henry Fox Talbot. Marked by the irregularities of an experimental process, each of Talbot’s paper negative prints were a singular result of a technology that had not yet shed its alchemical origins. The preparing, exposing, bathing, washing and rinsing of the prints were as important in the making of a photograph as the opening and closing of the shutter. Tichý’s improvisational darkroom technique recovers this irreducibly material, impure origin of photography itself. Like Talbot’s salted paper prints, each Tichý photograph is a unique entity whose beauty bears witness to the vicissitudes of duration; the temporal register of his work is not that of a perfect, punctual moment but of a palimpsest of circumstance.
Matching the alluring physical qualities of the photographic print with the classically seductive imagery of bathers, this series presents an exploration of desire by the photographer. Doyle elaborates:
Indeed, as much as they offer the delights of the flesh, the bather prints make us feel an even more primal drive: our need for delineated shape. It is our love of resolution, our eye’s hunger for contour and clarity - for form itself – that Tichý teases into a state of exquisite titillation.”
Sun Screen is curated by C. Sean Horton with an essay by Allan Doyle. In collaboration with Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York and Tichý Ocean Foundation, the exhibition is the artist’s first posthumous New York solo exhibition.
There will be a special screening of the documentary Miroslav Tichý: Tarzan Retired by Roman Buxbaum on Thursday, July 28th between 6-8pm as a part of the Chelsea Art Walk. The film will also be presented at other times throughout the exhibition. A tri-fold brochure, available on request, has been published on the occasion of the exhibition.
[Image: Miroslav Tichý "Untitled" (c.1950s-1980s) Unique gelatin silver print 7 x 5 in.]
Media
Schedule
from July 28, 2011 to September 10, 2011