A selection of photographs from a large body of work that began in the 1970s and continues to this day attempts to capture the most timeless and poetic scenes of a single setting: urban shop windows. The photographer Iren Stehli, a Swiss woman who found herself as a young student in Prague amidst the socialist aesthetics of scarcity and smallness, was fascinated by the environment - the absurd human creativity and the charm of the unwanted on the one hand, and the indifference of the city's inhabitants, the stasis and greyness on the other. At the time when the exhibited black-and-white frontal photographs were taken, the main trend in analogue photography was documentary. It brought information that was otherwise unavailable in a media-enclosed, barbed-wire-encircled territory.

But in her series Shop Window, Iren Stehli stepped out of the "hidden face of communist affluence" model and documented precisely what the regime boasted about, what it exhibited. We have deliberately removed the political from the selection: shop windows, after all, supplemented the lack of colourful merchandise with portraits of Communist statesmen, political slogans and posters; later in the 1990s, these were replaced by colourful prints of Western Coca-Cola options, or underdressed beauties or waving golden cats.

What was left? Pure beauty without intention, a hollowed-out existence, a poem without words, a message of Kafkaesque transformation. Taken out of the context of the vast whole that society serves up to the viewer to inanimate, our selection feels like the filigree work of an enchanted eye. It is indeed a document of the time, but - as mentioned - a very timeless one. The aim is to present the artist as a sensitive observer working in a time-lapse manner and to find moments in her work that transcend the medium of photography. The works on display present the artist, whose work in other cycles is filled with curious figures, as a demiurge of silent images where only an emotional trace of people remains.

Iren Stehli (*1953) went to Prague in 1972 to take a course in Czech for foreigners (her mother was Czech), and later studied Slavic Studies at Charles University. Coincidentally, she became passionate about photography and studied at FAMU in 1974-1979, where she met many lifelong friends, including the inspiring theoretician Anna Fárová. She was so enchanted by the Czech environment that she kept returning from Switzerland and most of her free work is therefore related to the Czech environment (the famous cycles Dance 1974-1977, Rybárna na Václavském náměstí 1976-1977, Krejčí Sláma 1976-1981, Libuna 1974-2001, Pražské výlohy 1976-1996).

She first exhibited in 1978 at the legendary Drama Club, and since 1983 her work has appeared in international shows. In 2014 she had a solo exhibition So nah, so fern at the well-known institution Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur, and a year later the Prague City Gallery also presented her work. Iren Stehli's portfolio also includes three publications.

Her photographs are represented in prestigious collections (Centre Pompidou, Sammlung der Stadt Zürich, Sammlung der Stadt Biel, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Prague City Gallery). After the 1989 revolution she became the director of the Pro Helvetia Foundation supporting Czech culture, which she headed for 8 years. She applied for Czech citizenship and still moves between Zurich and Prague.