Jan Tichy. Thin Lines

About

This exhibition resonates with his solo exhibition at the Galerie Kornfeld across the street.

The pedagogy of László Moholy-Nagy, developed at the New Bauhaus in Chicago has influenced Jan Tichy’s artistic practice. Education as a creative dialogue between students and instructors was a crucial element of this method. Jan Tichy has been developing this new Bauhaus master’s practice over the last decade at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Chicago Grid brings together artists and educators  who have previously collaborated with Tichy as teachers and as students, from both sides of the educational exchange. This exhibition questions the concept of the grid in its many forms and implications, giving a nod towards the Berlin Bauhaus artists, who were fascinated by the Chicago street grid system. The artists in this exhibition include:
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Faheem Majeed, Alfonso and Gillion Carrara, Kate Conlon and Boyang Hou, Shawn Decker, Frances Lightbound, David Rueter and Marissa Lee Benedict, and Helen Maria Nugent.

In his solo exhibition Thin Lines at Galerie Kornfeld, Tichy continues to build on the grid, bringing together rare spiritual materials from the Bauhaus in Dessau, allowing these materials to collide with our current social and political reality through their display and engagement in the show.

Jan Tichy’s collaboration in the László Moholy-Nagy exhibition at the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago laid the foundation of a close friendship with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, daughter of the Bauhaus master and chairwoman of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation. Jan Tichy’s interaction with the Hungarian artist, Bauhaus educator, and visionary László Moholy-Nagy finds its articulation in works that operate with methods Moholy-Nagy and fellow artists developed at Bauhaus, which Tichy transforms for the present time. After Moholy-Nagy brought his theories, practices and his artistic language to Chicago, a translation was needed back to Europe. Our show Thin Lines  now presents, with Jan Tichy, a fundamental part of this artistic legacy back to Europe during the Bauhaus centenary.

The 2012 video work “Things To Come (1936-2012)” can be seen as a joint effort of Jan Tichy with the deceased Bauhaus master, since Tichy had the unique opportunity to work with original takes of Moholy-Nagy that he shot for the English science-fiction movie “Things To Come” in the 1930s. Furthermore the work “Installation No.30 (TTC)” from 2016, is inspired by the life and work of Moholy-Nagy and by his first wife, the photographer Lucia Moholy, and stems from research carried out es in Berlin and Dessau, where both Moholys were active in Bauhaus during the 1930s, before their escape.

As a contemporary artist, Jan Tichy works at the junction between video, sculpture, architecture, and photography. His conceptual works are socially and politically involved. Born 1974 in Prague, he first studied art in Israel and received his Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he now works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography and the Department of Art and Technology.