Jiří Tichý

Running time: February 29, 2020 through to September 20, 2020 (extended)

Jiří Tichý’s woven fantasies are visually stunning and their monumental scale is truly overwhelming. This Czech artist does not weave his work in one piece but in different sections which he eventually stitches together. In order to achieve this he uses a specially constructed high-warp loom, toiling sometimes for months and sometimes for years on a single work.

The result in each instance is not a tapestry in the conventional sense because the works do not adhere to two dimensionality and rectangularity. They are often little more than a loose cohesion of woven fabrics, interspersed with lacunae and holes and with found objects worked into them. They shape themselves into playful contours with relief-like, malleable surfaces which Tichý has structured and furnished with a rhythm of their own.

Tichý’s work combines traditional folk art, mythological themes, the colourfulness and expressiveness of Expressionism, the ambiguity and inconsistency of Surrealist art and, last but not least, the ornamental streak of Art Nouveau, and the Bauhaus. His oeuvre is at once figurative, abstract and ornamental.

With the generous sponsorship of Dr. Otmar Franz.