Fotograf Magazine

Presenting only two of Jiří Černický‘s recent projects – and on those mainly because they employ the medium of photography – is to suppress the wide spectrum of creative activity which defines the artist, as well as his personal and artistic history. It should thus be noted, if only briefly, that the artist has consistently pursued a multi-media approach, but it is also important to stress the discursive versatility of his methods. Černický is usually placed within the generation which came to the fore in the second half of the 1990s, and who chose their means of expression with a freedom unprecedented in Czech art before then. It was symptomatic not only of Černický that he articulated his stance through a fascination for high-tech, industrial production, new technologies, and the incorporation of sci-fi motifs into contemporary reality. Černický’s work was all the more attractive in that it was from the very outset an amalgamation of the above-cited elements with the social, psychological and political condition of human society in the final years of the 20 ^th century. In all of this, photography has always played an important role. Some of his bizarre and fanciful design products, for example, were exhibited both as objects in their own right, and as the subject matter of his staged photographs, where they were presented either as part of casual everyday settings or in snapshots of some particular event. It was thus his photographs that enabled audiences to perceive Černický’s work in relation to concrete reality.