the exhibition is organized during the Photomonth in Krakow 2009

Pavel Vančát curator of exhibition (from "Style Options", 2009)

When in the spring of 2006 I concluded writing my text for the Torst Publishers monograph on Miroslav Tichý simultaneously with the retrospective exhibition at the Brno House of the Arts, I tried to eschew making any judgments. The deeper I immersed myself in sources, and above all in the whole scene in Kyjov around the artist, the more the situation around Miroslav Tichý seemed like an intersection of many parallel histories and stories.  Many of them have since become notorious, while some have, on the contrary, fallen into oblivion.  It is for this reason that I had decided to construct the first exhibition of Miroslav Tichý in Poland a little differently than just another exhibition derived from his major retrospectives, which (apart from an encounter with a peculiar artist) would offer little to surprise a viewer already aware of the phenomenon. Instead, I would like to indicate a different line within Tichý’s work, which has so far been documented only minimally.(...)

(...) The unreal media success of Miroslav Tichý presents a captivating story, which places a miraculously discovered artist into the role of a missionary figure, worshipped from afar and inspiring the greatest stars of contemporary art. The media story thus in fact suppresses a certain deprivation, a form of artistic reversal, which completely separated Tichý from his earliest fellow travelers, in order to – with the aid of a confluence of curious circumstances – catapult him fifty years later to the orbit of world museums and galleries.(...)

(...) Only through more detailed research and an attempt to place all sides of Tichý ‘s oeuvre in context does one gradually begin to fully appreciate him not only as a rootless eccentric, but also as an artist who chose a path leading far away from everything that might have been expected at the time.
All that is left is to stand amazed by the infinity and at the same time vulnerability of personal freedom, which in reality cannot be described, precisely because it is so extremely personal. One may see it up close and try to understand it, but one can never make judgments about it – one can merely stand in wonder, tracing its connecting lines and intersections.