“Archetypes, Space and Abstraction” was the title and subject of the latest exhibition by Czech artist Jiří Thýn. Like a number of contemporary artists who in this time of crisis have chosen to mine the hopeful era of early modernism, Thýn conceives a dialogue with the twentieth-century avant-garde—in his case with artists such as the Czech Cubist sculptor Otto Gutfreund, whose works Thýn sets into motion through the medium of photography.

It would be wrong to understand Thýn’s approach as a mere gesture of appropriation, which might come to mind when encountering his Untitled, 2011, a modified version of Katarzyna Kobro’s 1928 Constructivist sculpture Spatial Composition (2). Thýn’s strategy, rather, results in a multilayered comprehensive meaning; he examines the diffusion of time and space, the development of artistic strategies through time and their relevance in the present, as well as matters of authorship or originality. The use of analog film, typical of Thýn’s photographic work, on the one hand questions the significance of documenting an already existing artwork and the consequences of this process, while on the other it aspires to test and overcome the limits of photography as such. Through a complex play with light, the artist unveils what could be perceived as a fourth dimension, an illusion of movement in the otherwise static medium.

On a formal level, the five photographs in Thýn’s series “Space and Abstraction,” 2011, based on Gutfreund’s sculptures Seated Woman, 1916, Don Quixote, 1911, and Cellist, 1912–13, among others, “perform” the sculptural quality of the originals and thus could be easily mistaken for a simple attempt to initiate a dialogue between the present and the past. Other works installed among the “Space and Abstraction” series, however, mostly combine or layer images from real life with abstract geometric forms achieved through darkroom manipulation (multiple exposure, experimentation with developing fluid). They manifest the fragmented nature of the present and point to the ever-growing distance from reality, resulting in the conception of the natural as an element of the “other.”

Thýn’s current engagement with the historical avant-garde can be understood as a result of his increasing tendency toward formal reduction, of which his photograph of cuboid forms, Untitled, 2011, offers a clear example. But Thýn’s experimental work with analog film and his rejection of the digital can also on many levels be perceived as an endeavor to present a truer depiction of reality, one rooted not only in the applied strategy of depicting the object but also in the production process that precedes it. Moreover, his employment of obsolete photographic techniques to reconsider the legacy of abstraction can be understood as a unique commentary on our present-day condition, where the emergence of new technologies and the dynamics of social change have brought about a further abstraction in everyday life. Thýn is not attempting to extract moments from history or appropriate the already appropriated and thus view the past through the prism of the present, but rather to discover effective strategies for capturing a new image of our already abstracted reality.

—Markéta Stará