"o.T. 21"
photogram on gelatin silver paper
titled, dated, numbered and signed on lable verso
Jan Tichy's Berlin exhibition Weight of Glass at Galerie Kornfeld in Autumn/Winter 2016/17 is based on extensive research by the artist in Berlin and Dessau on László Moholy-Nagy, one of the most innovative artists and art teachers in the early 20th century, and his first wife Lucia Moholy. Both artists were active at the Bauhaus, both had to leave Germany after 1933.
Lucia Moholy was a photographer and with her pictures from the years before 1933, she had a decisive influence on our image of the Bauhaus in Dessau, as she photographed both the buildings, i.e. the Bauhaus itself and the Masters' Houses, as well as the many different art, design and everyday objects that were created at the Bauhaus.
Lucia Moholy was for a long time the only trained photographer at the Bauhaus. She was familiar with all the technical details of photography and set up the first darkroom at the Dessau Bauhaus in the basement of the Masters' House in Dessau, which she lived in together with her husband, the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. This is probably also where the first experiments with the photogram - photography without a camera - took place. In this process, the property of photographic paper to react to light is used, but the diversion via the camera is avoided. The light-sensitive photographic paper is therefore not exposed with the negative of a motif previously photographed with the camera, but an object itself is placed directly on the light-sensitive paper and then exposed. The photo paper is then developed and fixed as normal. The resulting image is an image of the object that was on the photo paper - but abstracted, because the photo paper is designed to turn a negative into a positive. What is light on the developed photogram was dark in reality - and vice versa.
In their photograms, the Moholys experimented with what they found - household objects such as combs or scissors, but also their bodies or parts of them such as their hands or faces. Jan Tichy, on the other hand, works in his photograms on paper in the format 18 x 24 cm with small glass plates in the format 9 x 12 cm. These two formats, 9 x 12 cm and 18 x 24 cm respectively, are characteristic formats of large-format photographic negatives, as Lucia Moholy also used them at the Bauhaus.
Since Lucia Moholy was of Jewish descent and, after separating from László in 1929, had been married to a communist member of the Reichstag and later a resistance fighter, she emigrated in 1933, soon after Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of the Reich. She had to leave her whole stock of negatives, which at that time were glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion in the formats 18 x 24 cm and 9 x 12 cm, behind in Germany. At first they remained in the care of her ex-husband, who passed them on to Walter Gropius when he fled Germany. Lucia Moholy's efforts to bring the negatives to England failed, and so she believed her negatives and thus her work, which she had produced until 1933, were lost. After the end of the war, some of Gropius' pictures were used without naming the true author of the photographs, and it was only many years later that Lucia received at least some of her negatives back after a legal dispute. However, about 330 of her glass plate negatives have been lost to date. The photograms by Jan Tichy, which work with glass plates measuring 9 x 12 cm on 18 x 24 cm photo paper, are a homage to Lucia Moholy.
Jan Tichy's involvement with the Bauhaus and especially with Lucia Moholy continues to this day and will culminate, among other things, in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Praha in 2022, which, in cooperation with Dr. Robin Schuldenfrei of the Courtauld Institute, will present the entire photographic oeuvre of Lucia Moholy to the public for the first time. Since it is unlikely that all of the works can be found again, artistic interventions by Jan Tichy will be part of this presentation in addition to the originals by Lucia Moholy.
(Gallerie Kornfeld Berlin, 2016)