In February, the exhibition Dictionary of Methods, one of the most important representatives of the art of collage and at the same time an original poet Jiří Kolář, ended in the Kampa Museum. The exhibition, named after one of his books, presented in a complex form the creative work of this broad-spectrum artist, who established himself with his unique style at home in Czechoslovakia, but also abroad.
Jiří Kolář was born into a poor family and spent his childhood in Kladno, where he learned to be a carpenter. He has been writing poetry since he was young, and thanks to the poet František Halas, he managed to publish his first work in 1941 under the name Baptismal List. Together with the literary and art critic Jindřich Chalupecký, they later founded Skupina 42, and Kolář's texts became a manifesto of this group's aesthetics. For his most important collection of poems, The Liver of Prometheus, he fell out of favor with the communist regime and spent nine months in pretrial detention. After returning from prison, Jiří Kolář did not want to continue to be dependent on the ideological supervision of state publishing houses for his existence, so instead of words, he began to devote himself to so-called subject poetry, in which he replaced words with subjects and objects, until he finally moved on to creating collages. In the 1960s, he already exhibited his works at the most important exhibitions of modern art in London, Sao Paulo, Osaka or New York. In total, he held more than 300 exhibitions, published 10 monographs and several dozen anthologies. He developed the art of collage into other artistic techniques such as rollage, prolage, muchlaze, chiasmage, assemblage, anti-collage, confrontation, reportage, stratification and more than a hundred other methods that he invented himself. Thematically, the author refers in his works to the multifaceted nature of the world in all its forms. He does not shy away from depicting portraits, the animal kingdom, natural phenomena, sporting events, folklore motifs, music or artefacts that have inspired his own work. At the beginning of the 1980s, Jiří Kolář traveled to Paris at the invitation of the modern art center Georges Pompidou. In the end, his work in Paris was extended for a whole decade, because the Czechoslovak authorities refused him an official extension of his stay due to the signing of Charter 77. At this time, the artist was also active in literature, as he published the regular Revue K and also the book Edition K, dedicated to the Czech and Slovak exile art. He obtained French citizenship in 1984, but unfortunately, his wife Běla could finally travel to see him only in 1985. They both returned home after the "gentle" revolution and together opened the Jiří and Běla Kolářová Gallery in Prague. Together with Václav Havel and Theodor Pištěk, Jiří Kolář was responsible for establishing the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize, which is an award for young visual artists under the age of 35. His artworks are represented in the collections of prestigious world galleries such as the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris or the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kolář's collages are among the best that were created in Czechoslovak visual arts in the 20th century, and perhaps the author himself defines this most succinctly in his own words: "I'm supposed to talk about music and I'm talking about poetry, but for me they are continuous containers, just like poetry and art .” Jiří Kolář had the rare gift of connecting all these types of art into exciting objects, shapes and forms like no one else.
Vladimír Dubeň