Jindrich Styrsky: On the Needles of These Days

The inaugural exhibition of Ubu Gallery will consist of a rare group of photographs by the Czech avant garde artist, Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942). These photographs were the basis for the artist’s surrealist masterpiece, On the Needles of these Days (published clandestinely in 1941 with original photographs and more widely in 1945 with gravure reproductions) and were accompanied by a characteristically surrealist and anti-war, anti-Nazi poem by Jindrich Heisler (1914 - 1953).

Styrsky’s photographs of found objects, store windows, graffiti, mannequins, posters and banners are records of immediate reality and illuminate the marvelous in the everyday. They are much in the tradition of Atget investigating the “concrete irrationality” of objective reality as interpreted directly by photography, although with a more developed modernist bent.

The eminent Czech artist and theoretician, Karel Teige (1900 – 1951), commented that Styrsky’s photographs “capture commonplace and bizarre realities with documentary fidelity, doing so with merciless precision and unusual, quite impersonal technique, without any intentional or artificial arrangement of the theme, nor awaiting interesting light conditions.”

Jindrich Styrsky: On the Needles of These Days