Jiři Kolař - Viaggio in Italia

About

Futura Art Gallery presents the personal exhibition of the Czech artist Jiři Kolař entitled "Viaggio in Italia" (Journey to Italy). A collection of eighteen enigmatic and kaleidoscopic works that allow a multifaceted reading of his imagination.

Known primarily as a poet, Kolař arrives at "evident poetry" as a new expressive language capable of representing the most profound emotions through the use of fragments of images.

He therefore developed different collage techniques, using masterpieces of the art of Pollaiolo, Botticelli, Bruegel, Vermeer, Klee and many others.

The image is translated, crumpled, cut into fragments, into strips, into small squares as if destroyed, losing its original appearance and then being recreated. During this process of union and separation we have the unconventional creation of Kolař's work which becomes a universal language. The image is therefore deformed, lengthened and dilated in space, changing also in the rhythm of its original appearance.

The technique in Kolař's work is central but not preponderant; for him the work is not a reproduction but a creation, where different images and historical and genre contexts come together to give life to a simultaneous and magical vision.

"Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, on a plane that apparently does not fit them." (Max Ernst)

Jiři Kolař was born in Protivin (Bohemia) on September 24th 1914. In 1934 he began writing poetry and made collages influenced by Poetism and Futurism, which he exhibited in the first solo exhibition at the Prague Mozarteum in 1937. In 1942, together with other artists , founded the Group 42 (Skupina 42), which celebrates "the enchantment of technology". Between 1959 and 1961, he worked on his Básně ticha (Poems in silence) which break with verbal poetry and push the poem to deconstruct already begun by Stephane Mallarmè in his Coup de dé and followed by Guillaume Apollinaire in his Calligrams. For this reason his creation takes the form of a collage made with printed texts and images. Kolar is the only one to have made three solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He died in Prague in the summer of 2002