Miloš Budík – I am a Photographer

The exhibition titled Miloš Budík - I am a Photographer is an exceptional event presenting the lifelong work of the Brno photographer in three exhibition spaces at the same time: at Špilberk, where a significant part of his work is preserved, at Villa Tugendhat, which he photographed consistently for almost his entire career, and at the Valchařská Gallery, which has been his "exhibition base" in recent years. Miloš Budík (1935–2023) was one of the key figures of Czechoslovak photography in the 1950s and 1960s. His images celebrating seemingly mundane events in city streets were widely known. Over the years, however, he became an extraordinarily versatile photographer who was able to produce brilliant advertising, fashion, report and landscape photographs.

Since the 1950s, Budík’s name has been inextricably linked with Villa Tugendhat, which now represents one of his most famous photographic collections.

At the beginning of 1956, Miloš Budík entered a seemingly inconspicuous, somewhat strange house at 45 Černopolní Street in Brno with his camera. He was sent to this address by the editorial office of the Rovnost daily, with which he was then working as a budding photographer. Little did he know that the set of about sixty shots he would take there would become, after many decades, a valuable documentary and at the same time an exceptional artistic account of one of the most important buildings in modern world architecture. The famous Villa Tugendhat had then already served as a rehabilitation centre for children and young people with spinal defects at the nearby Regional Children’s Hospital for several years. Neither the report nor the photographs from Villa Tugendhat were published in Rovnost in 1956. However, he made many of his most famous photographs as a young man. At an age when other artists were just looking around, his photographs were winning international salons, filling exhibitions and pages of various magazines. He took his most famous picture, The Gymnasium, in Villa Tugendhat at the age of twenty-one.

Budík’s photographs have become so iconic over time that they have recently been the subject of a separate publication, “Miloš Budík. Villa Tugendhat. 1956” (Brno City Museum, 2015), and the current exhibition is accompanied by a representative monograph of Budík’s work. A selection of the photographs will be presented on the ground floor of Villa Tugendhat, where they were captured more than sixty years ago.

Exhibition opening: Tuesday 13 June 2023, 18:00
Exhibition: 14 June – 3 September 2023 (accessible without reservation Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00)

Organisers: Brno City Museum – Department of Architectural History and the Villa Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre

Curator of the exhibition: Lukáš Bártl

Curators for Villa Tugendhat: Barbora Benčíková, Michal Kolář

Translation: Kateřina Báňová

Production and PR: Barbora Benčíková, Petr Dvořák, Ludmila Haasová, Michal Kolář – Villa Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre

More information about the exhibition at Špilberk Castle is here.