Beijing Art Now Gallery is pleasant to represent the major Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy’s First Solo Exhibition in Beijing from November 9h 2007 to January 1st 2008, in Shanghai from November 11th 2007 to February 28th 2008.Born in 1925 in Moldavia, then in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, Miroslav Tichy pursued a photographic career, if it can be called that, at complete odds to the standard canon. In his early life a promising graduate of the Academy of Art, Prague, he rebelled against communism and was rewarded for his dissidence with a total of eight years imprisonment. His subsequent artistic work, produced mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, was marked not just by dissidence, but reclusiveness, obsession and an extreme form of independence from all photographic norms. Tichy’s work is marked by primitivism, rejection of technical excellence, and an almost complete re-working of the process of photography that began with putting together (construction is too sophisticated a term) his own cameras out of toilet rolls, tin cans, spectacle lenses and other junk. He applied this device with a dogged obsessiveness to one theme only — the furtive photography of women in his own small town, often making a hundred exposures a day. The camera lacking a viewfinder, Tichy could at best imagine what he was shooting, which suited his style of briefly pulling it out from concealment, and the creative work was concentrated in the darkroom, where he would develop the negatives and search for worthwhile images, before printing them and then beginning painstaking if eccentric re-touching and hand-drawn additions. Handmade card passepartouts complete the images — unique and exquisite objects made for himself only.It was only with the 2005 ‘New Discovery Award’ at Arles that Tichy’s curious work came to public attention, since when it has attracted great interest internationally. Culturally, artistically and socially a complete outsider, Tichy has a primitive and obsessive approach to photography that follows a wild purity in its lack of concern for normality and acceptability. If there are echoes of the work of American Gary Winogrand, who similarly shot large numbers of images for later selection with little concern for any rules of composition, and who was also drawn to photographing women in the street, Tichy’s output is the more compelling for its intensity, privacy and the melancholic vision of a recluse and hermit. He said, “I’ve photographed what looked like the world.”His first solo exhibition was at the Kunsthaus, Zurich, in 2005. After this solo exhibition at Beijing Art Now Gallery, the first outside Europe, Tichy’s work will be exhibited in 2008 in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt and at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.