Biography
Although Tomáš Tichý achieved his Master’s Degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2011 as a restorer, part of his Diploma Thesis was represented by several exceptionally distinctive artworks of his own creation. In these, he blended the melancholy of the light-based poetic vision of painting with a critical perspective on some of the problematic aspects of our technological civilization. He painted area-wide glass walls of administration buildings where one’s privacy is completely lost in the bustle of the street outside, or secluded corners of the town dominated by waste containers. The encounter of nature and civilization was reflected in an extraordinarily sensitive way here. The aim was reached by using a carefully modulated mournful gray in the main tonality of the paintings, which shows the artist’s will to discover the possible shape that the lyricism of the problematic town scenery might take today. There are very few painters who would be able to unite the intimate emotionality of painting with an open criticism both in the choice of motifs and in their unequivocal interpretation. Tomáš Tichý’s works have quickly thrust him into the current of young figure painting in the Czech Republic today.
All of the above stated is to persuade us that contemporary young figure painting in the Czech Republic is able to provide a substantial contribution to the international discussion on the question of the topicality of the return to classical figurative painting – which, in fact, as the involved art metaphors of Tomáš Tichý’s paintings prove, never disappeared below the horizon of the developments in fine art around the world today.
PhDr. Jan Kriz
