Jan Tichy
6 July – 31 August 2020, Schlemmer House
// Invitation //
Exhibition: 4 October 2020 – 14 March 2021
Jan Tichy, born in 1974, is the second resident in Schlemmer House in 2020. Tichy was born in Prague and is now based as an artist and art educator in Chicago, where he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jan Tichy works in photography, video, new media and installation. For him, art is a form of communication as well as a way to mediate between past, present and future: “To ask questions about the future, one has to rely on understanding of history. I am interested in how we preserve, write and tell histories.”
As an art educator, Tichy also sees himself as part of an educational history derived from the Bauhaus: “I teach the way that was developed here in Dessau following on Weimar and and continued in Berlin at the Bauhaus, and later at the New Bauhaus in Chicago,” says Tichy. He is particularly interested in the art and pedagogy of László Moholy-Nagy. His most recent publication is Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints collected by László Moholy-Nagy, which he edited together with Robin Schuldenfrei and published with Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology.
Tichy also has an ongoing relationship with Dessau:
“The Bauhaus architecture here came into my practice a couple of years ago while exploring the relationship between photography of Lucia Moholy and the architectore of Walter Gropius. One of the crucial questions in this relation has been: Who owns the image? The question of ownership is a profound one for design and architecture in relationship to photography. When Lucia Moholy was here, photographing with her two cameras, she was the only one photographing – everybody else was living here. Today, nobody is living here (except for the artists in residence in a way), but everybody who comes here has a camera and the amount of photographs taken here resonates with the ideas of Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy on production and reproduction as well as with Moholy’s famous prediction that one day everybody will walk around with a camera.”
