Jan Tichy Czech Republic, b. 1974

Jan Tichy was born in 1974 in Prague, Czech Republic, and lives and works in Chicago. His formation was shaped by an unusually broad intellectual and geographic trajectory. He first studied political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before redirecting his path toward art: he studied photography at the Musrara School of Photography in Jerusalem and pursued advanced studies in art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Tel Aviv. In 2007 he moved to Chicago, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is now Associate Professor in the Department of Photography and the Department of Art and Technology Studies at SAIC, one of the most influential art schools in the United States.

Tichy's practice works at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, sound, and photography, combining these elements into installations in which the narrative is deliberately open to interpretation. His central medium is video projection used as a time-based source of light: projected onto architectural surfaces, objects, and structures, light becomes the material through which he creates physical and psychic spaces that explore concealment, obscurity, and the relationship between what is visible and what remains hidden. His work is both formally precise and socially committed. In 2011, "Project Cabrini Green" illuminated with spoken word the last high-rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago during its month-long demolition, giving voice to a community on the verge of erasure. In 2014 he began a long-term, NEA-supported community project in Gary, Indiana, the Heat Light Water cultural platform, which brought together residents, artists, and institutions around the city's ongoing social and environmental crisis. In 2017, "Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint," presented at the Broad Museum in Michigan, brought teenagers from Flint and Lansing together to share their experience of the water crisis. Since 2018, Tichy has been among the inaugural artists for Art on the Mart in Chicago, one of the largest permanent video art projections in the world.

Tichy's work is held in significant public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Magasin 3 Stockholm Kunsthall; and the Spertus Museum, Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2008); the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2010); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2011); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2012); the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2012); the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2016); the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2016); the Berman Museum of Art, Collegeville, Pennsylvania (2017); and the MSU Broad Museum of Art, East Lansing (2017). His work has been included in international biennials and exhibitions in Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Venice, New York, Portland, and Washington D.C.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has been a consistent partner in presenting Jan Tichy's practice to European audiences. The gallery presented his solo exhibition "Weight of Glass" in 2016, a work that mirrored the escape of photographer Lucia Moholy from Berlin in 1933 and drew a connection to the fate of contemporary migrants. His solo exhibition "Thin Lines" followed, presenting a new body of work at the gallery. In 2024, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented "Ornament als Versprechen," a duo exhibition with Jay Gard in which Tichy's small-format cyanotypes, documenting architectural details such as fences, railings, and grids around Rue des Archives in Paris, entered into dialogue with Gard's sculptures and paintings. The exhibition engaged with the formal language of the Bauhaus, a particularly significant reference for both artists, who had each lived and worked as residents in one of the Bauhaus Master Houses. Tichy's practice continues to expand across community engagement, architectural intervention, and intimate photographic series, maintaining throughout a rigorous commitment to the social and political dimensions of light, space, and image.