1933, Karlín Studios

Markéta Othová is one of the most respected Czech photographers of the post-revolutionary generation. She regularly exhibits at leading institutions in the Czech Republic and abroad, and she has received numerous accolades for her work. She has been nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award three times, winning in 2002, and in 2020 she received the Michal Ranný Award for established artists. Her work has undergone a significant evolution over the years, gradually transitioning from intimate, personal photographs to works with a conceptual approach and pieces inspired by avant-garde photography and shifting from classic large-format black-and-white photographs to color digital prints. Her works from the 1990s were influenced by a so-called “archival turn” and were based on the artistic processing of her extensive personal archive, particularly from her travels abroad. Gradually, Othová turned to studio photography and the reductive, impersonal techniques of modernist photography, which she used to capture seemingly mundane objects. Her work is characterized by a focus on series and a subversion of the medium through subtle imperfections such as underexposure or slight blurring. The photographs from the series 1933 are a personal tribute to the artist’s father, who died in 2014—the title of the series refers to the year of his birth. Here Othová captures his glass products, created by cutting industrially manufactured bottles. Although the work looks like a product photograph of design objects, Othová treats the subject more as a minimalist still life and deliberately avoids technical perfection – a choice underscored by her use of billboard paper, which is entirely unsuitable for depicting a photograph perfectly but aligns with the poetics of her work.

80 % of the hammer price is allocated to support the non-profit foundation Spolu s odvahou, a member of the Bátor Tábor family.