Jan Saudek

   The Czech Republic has long been a land of mystery and magic, home to alchemists, artists and the original bohemians, all of them weavers of spells, creators of fantastic worlds of the imagination. Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For nearly four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and coloured by desire. "I can't portray others' lives, only my own," he says and this first complete retrospective maps it for us, a disturbing and explicit place where beauty is found in "ugliness".

Rejecting the supermodel look in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: Old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely coloured and almost mythical theatre of life as it could be. From his debut in the Fifties through his lesser known work to today, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution", fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have.