Jiří Valoch

Jiří Valoch’s artistic practice has been fundamentally defined by a sensitivity to language since the mid-1960s. Valoch created his first textual installation in the spring of 1970, during the last pioneering years of conceptual art. From an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, we know that this piece was a minimal object poem titled ticho (silence), and that it was included in an exhibition by the Club of Concretists at Brno’s House of the Lords of Kunštát (13–30 March 1970). In this single word, rendered in black on a white, horizontally oriented panel, special emphasis was placed on the letter “i” – by “dotting” it from both above and below, Valoch disrupted the word’s conventional semantics, leaving the viewer uncertain how to approach the work and how to interpret it.