Jiří Thýn works in, and with, the medium of photography, although characteristically his work crosses the borderlines of the medium, pushing beyond into installation and interventions. In his photographic and object-based installations, Thýn attempts a subjective reflection of the world against the background of contemporary events. While Thýn’s main means of expression remains the medium of photography, in which he tries to work with formally, as does a painter, the medium of installation is also an essential part of his work and is meant to support the overall emotion of the exhibited works.

Over the past few years, he has been developing a body of work that deals with contemporary visual and linguistic language as a prerequisite for communication and culture. His aim is to highlight the issues of global modernist visuality in confrontation to the “untranslate-ability” of local languages with their special and individual codes. Thýn’s studies of pictorial compositions are trying to break away from the flat two dimensional surface only to return back to it again (in the words of the Czech curator Pavel Vančát) with a painful exhalation. After many years of gradually refining his own “conceptual lyricism”, Thýn has recently addressed the questions of pictorial consciousness (or unconsciousness) and of the capturing of reality on the background of the modernist canon.

Jiří Thýn (born 1977, Prague) studied at UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture in Prague) and AVU (Academy of Fine Arts). From 2014-8 he was a professor in the photography department of FAMU (the Film Academy) in Prague and currently heads the photography studio at the University of Jan Evangelista, Department of Fine Arts, in Ústí nad Labem and teaches at Scholastika College in Prague. His work has been featured in major institutional group exhibitions such as Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016); The Prague National Gallery at the Trade Fair Palace (2016); the Photographer’s Gallery in London (2016); The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, N.Y., USA (2016); Galerie Rudofinum, Prague (2011); MoCP – Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, USA (2010); Casino Luxembourg, forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg (2010), and he most recently has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Prague City Gallery in 2021 (Silence, Torso, the Present) and at the Brno House of Arts in 2017 (In Search of a Monument II), He is currently working on a new series of work that will be exhibited at Fait Gallery in Brno in October 2023 and a new monograph book of his work that will be published later this year.

Jiří Thýn full CV