In a world filled with chaos and crisis Timotheus Tomicek’s photographs are like a meticulously ordered haven of tranquillity. They focus on the essentials, without distractions or points of dissipation. And what creates the impression of a carefully staged production is, in the case of most of the photographs, the result of a concentrated view on the existing and the found.
Tomicek, whose approach to photography has clearly been shaped by his film studies, shows that sequential narrative form and individual images are not mutually exclusive. His photographs are not utopias. They are concrete, minimalistic and at the same time poetic in the way in which they lend new interest to the familiar. “To collect photographs is to collect the world”Susan Sontag once wrote in “On Photography”. Tomicek carefully gathers his world into photographs and releases them for others so they can partake and create their own image, even if “merely” thought.

Dr Astrid Peterle, art historian in Vienna.