Fourteen thousand exhibition openings in seventeen years of life
Download image
Martin Fryč was born on 2 August 1970 in Prague into a family with a brewery tradition, his father Rudolf Fryč worked as a brewery laboratory technician, his mother Alena Fryčová as a rehabilitation nurse. He spent his childhood in Louny, later the family moved to Prague, where his father ran a malting plant in Nusle. He grew up in the time of normalization, at home listening to the Voice of America, while at school he was a Pioneer member and later a Socialist Youth Union member. From a young age he was interested in Western culture and cartography. In the mid-1980s, he entered secondary brewery school, where he was greatly influenced by his teacher Jiří Podzimek, who introduced him to the world of the underground. In 1989, he joined the Society for a Cheerful Present, a recessionist initiative, and took a course in music journalism, which functioned as a samizdat workshop. After unsuccessful attempts to gain admission to university, he worked at the Research Institute of Plant Production and as an assistant at the University of Chemical Technology (VŠCHT). In 1990, he took up a combined history-geography course at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FF UK) and the Faculty of Science (PřF UK), graduating in 1997. After that he worked in OD Máj, Makro, Hilton Hotel and for 20 years in Hill International recruitment agency. In 2008 he started photographing openings and his pictures have become a chronicle of Prague’s cultural life. He published the book Contemporary Art through the Eyes of Martin Fryč and documented almost 14,000 exhibition openings until 2025. In 2025 he lived in Prague, worked as an assistant to the managing director at EKP Advisory and continued to document cultural life.
