Exposition Art Blog: Collage art Jirí Kolá

Collage art Jirí Kolá

Jirí Kolá (24 September 1914, Protivín – 11 August 2002, Prague) was a Czech poet, writer, painter and translator. His work included both literary and visual art.
His first exhibitions in 1937 focused on his collages. In the 1960s Kolář first combined painting and poetry but he gradually turned completely to experiments in visual art. In his work he used a scalpel to cut pictures out of magazines. He produced colors in his collages by gluing on printed fragments of paper from various different sources.






His collages were intended to influence the viewer's outlook on life; the technique of using fragments of text and images from various different sources was well suited to achieve the effect Kolář wanted, by showing the destruction and fragmentation of the world Kolář inhabited. Simultaneously, by juxtaposition and contrasting of these different fragments the technique of the collage served to create surprising and visually striking new combinations; for instance, the combination of astronomical maps with Braille writing. Kolář invented or helped to develop new techniques of collage - confrontage, froissage, rollage etc.





Since the 1960s Kolář's visual artwork was featured regularly in exhibitions by galleries and museums, . Some of the more prominent exhibitions of his work were in the New York Guggenheim museum in 1975, and in Prague in 1994 in Dům U Černé Matky Boží.
"Like most great artists of the past century, Kolář was both an anarchist and a reactionary. In order to “make it new,” the artist must systematically reject every aesthetic tendency that’s come before; the artist can either accomplish this task via exclusion or destruction. Witnessing first-hand the steady self-destruction of European civilization throughout his life, it seems only natural that Kolář would go the latter route – picking through the debris and disfiguring all that he came across, granting his objects a novel significance that certainly would’ve baffled their original creators." Travis Jeppesen.Wikipedia





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