Richard Gray Gallery
875 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 2503
John Hancock Center
Chicago, IL 60611
Jan Tichy: Installations was ranked the best gallery show of the year by New City Chicago, and described by Lori Waxman in the Chicago Tribune as a “mesmerizing world of slowly cast light and meticulously calibrated spaces... a museum quality exhibition of nine projects."
The exhibition received a great review in Frieze Magazine.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Jan Tichy, presented in a temporary project space one floor below the Chicago gallery in the famed Skidmore, Owings & Merrill‐designed John Hancock Center. Jan Tichy: Installations consists of nine works made over the past three years and is the artist’s largest solo show to date.
Jan
Tichy
works
at
the
intersection
of
video,
sculpture,
architecture,
and
photography;
many
of
his
works
combine
these
elements.
In
Installation
No.
4
(Towers),
a
nuanced
digital
video
is
projected
from
overhead
onto
dual
“towers”:
two
handmade
paper
sculptures
standing
three
feet
tall.
The
animated
video
projection
seems
to
call
the
towers
to
action
in
different
ways,
at
times
implicating
them
in
naturalistic landscapes.
The architecture
of
the
towers
is
familiar,
though
a
precise
referent
goes
purposely
unnamed.
Also on view is a new work the artist filmed this summer of children at play on a school playground in Gary, Indiana. Recess is a ten‐minute single channel HD video projection, shot continuously from a single bird’s‐eye view. The volume of sub‐narratives contained within Recess forces the viewer to necessarily shift back and forth, and yet the overall composition of children swarming becomes abstract, belying the many vignettes of innocence, antagonism, rough play and wild energy.
A highlight of the exhibition is a site‐specific video‐light installation the artist created while working in the exhibition space over the past three months. The work directly responds to the interior architecture of the building, employing part of the famous X‐shaped beam as a 3D surface for projection. Among the other works included is RAW, a work in which raw photography files are translated for both their image and sound content, and then recombined as video, resulting in the sensation that you are hearing what you are seeing.
Born in Prague in 1974, Jan Tichy moved to Israel in the mid 1990s. After studying at Bezalel Academy of Art, in 2007 he moved to Chicago, where he earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute earlier this year. He has had one‐person exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and, in the fall of 2010, he will have a solo show at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Over the past two years his work has been included in exhibitions at public institutions in Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Jerusalem, Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Venice, and Washington, D.C.