A student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy left school in the summer of 1948, likely for personal and political reasons (the Prague coup). During the 1950s, he imitated Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse, following Cubist and Impressionist trends. He turned to photography in the 1970s. Tichy explained his transition to photography this way: “Paintings were painted, drawings were drawn. What was there to do? I was looking for another way. With photography, I found something new, a new world.”

He then built his own cameras and enlarger from various materials, metal plates, optical glass, and so on.

The subject of his photographs is almost exclusively the representation of women, whom Tichy approached in the streets and at the swimming pool. He would pull out his camera, hidden under his sweater, at the opportune moment, taking a picture without looking through the viewfinder, claiming that this method allowed him to "capture a swallow in flight." This technique explains Tichy's style: underexposed, slightly out of focus, and often produced from damaged negatives. He stopped creating in the early 1990s.

Major museums and international events quickly recognized Tichy's genius: Harald Szeemann organized his first solo exhibition at the 2004 Seville Biennale, followed by a solo retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2005, and his first solo exhibition in the Czech Republic in 2006, in Brno, which included a concert by the British composer and performer Michael Nyman.

Tichy's work was also exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arle photography festival in 2005, where he received the "Discovery Award" for that year.

Tichy is the only Art Brut artist to date to have had a major solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2008.

"I am the prophet of disintegration, the pioneer of chaos, because new things can only emerge from chaos." Miroslav Tichy