Illinois Institute of Technology

About the Photographer

Othová, Markéta

Czech, b. 1968

Markéta Othová creates black-and-white sequential images that communicate a sense of temporality, a practice that aligns her work with photography as it was employed by conceptual artists during the 1970s. An example is her Untitled diptych made at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 2006. In this work, Othová records details of the interior of Crown Hall, the famous building designed by Mies van der Rohe that houses the university’s architecture school. The left hand image is of a ceiling tile shattered on the floor. The right-hand image presents a view of the suspended ceiling with one tile missing. Combining the photographs provides us with a view that could never be seen, both the floor and the ceiling at once. In this way Othová reconstructs the cognitive process that would occur at the scene: one would look down at the fallen tile and then look up for its origin, or vice-versa. Othová’s choice to put the shattered tile on the left and the missing tile on the right maps the trajectory of the tile in reverse and communicates a sense of duration.

Markéta Othová studied photography at the Academy of Applied Arts, Prague from 1987-1993. Her works have been internationally exhibited in solo shows at Kunsthalle Mucsarnok, Budapest (2007), Nicolas Krupp Contemporary Art Gallery, Basel (2007) and The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2006), among others. Group exhibitions include Czech Photography of the 20th Century at Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn (2009) and Sitting, Standing, Reclining II at Modern Culture, New York (2005). In 2002, Othová was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize in Prague. The artist lives and works in Prague.