Běla Kolářová

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Artist Běla Kolářová (1923, Terezín - 2010, Praha), národnost: česká

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Z cykluStopy

Rok1961

Materiál a technikaparafín na transparentním podkladu

Rozměry10,7 × 9,3 cm

Klasifikacefotografie

Credit LineKunsthalle Praha

Licenční podmínky

Popis dílaBěla Kolářová was a prominent Czech artist and photographer. Her work is inseparably linked to the so-called second avantgarde of the 1960s. Alongside her Constructivist-oriented peers, Kolářová used her work to explore questions of the creative process and the initial concept which defines the final composition. In contrast to stringent constructivism, her work is strongly influenced by Neo-Dadaism and the Czech movement known as new sensitivity, both of which pursued a playful approach to order and geometric structure. Kolářová’s distinctive style is defined by intimacy and authenticity; the techniques and materials she uses are closely linked to manual and domestic work and the stereotypically conceived women’s world in general, conveying an intuitive affinity with feminism. Her entry into art was through photography, which she engaged with from the mid-1950s onward. Her photographs mostly captured banal objects and their fragments, which she arranged into geometric grids. Subsequently, she began to focus on experimenting with negatives in a darkroom, working with photograms, roentgenograms, light painting, and artificial negatives. She then developed an interest in collages and assemblages composed of everyday objects such as makeup, hairpins, snap fasteners, and leftover kitchen waste. Due to their relation to questions of rational structures, these works represent an original contribution to contemporary constructivist and minimalist tendencies. During the 1970s, Kolářová created large-format drawings using makeup and body prints, reflecting the trends of body art and new artistic understandings of corporeality and eroticism. In her subsequent work, Kolářová moved away from exclusively focusing on women’s existence and identity, producing a series of assemblages in collaboration with her husband, Jan Kolář. Instead of visual imagery, her work began to primarily incorporate texts and their fragments. In the following years, she returned to pictorial motifs, creating humorous, brightly colored assemblages. Untitled (Fabrics) (1961) is part of a larger series of artificial negatives that Kolářová created between 1961 and 1962. These works represented the realm of total experimentation, where Kolářová found elements of suprareality in the mundane fragments of physical reality. In creating these works, she used the malleability of wax, as well as lacquer, glue, and oil, all capable of carrying the imprints and traces of subtle, minute structures, which were transferred onto the delicate structural surface. Apart from various imprints, Kolářová also incorporated fragments of objects from nature and everyday life into some of these small, artificial plates (for instance wires, threads, clock components, potato, onion, and grape skins, prints of pheasant and peacock feathers, fish scales, a sea sponge, matches, carp scales, nutmeg prints, small feathers, fruit pits, fabric prints, traces of smoke). Initially, these compositions were conceived merely as photographic negatives for the creation of experimental photographs. However, their fragile, transparent presence and distinctive structural and processual character saw them become valued as autonomous, delicate, and uniquely innovative artworks evocative of the works of the New Realists and Vladimír Boudník. They also resemble the creative experiments of Czech artificialism and surrealism, which used material reality as a starting point for exploring new realms of the imagination. This intimate work was created by imprinting a fabric onto a fine layer of wax, thus creating a heterogeneous surface with a varied structure, including several spots where the wax surface completely vanishes. These negatives have been presented to the public as part of Kolářová’s exhibitions at the Egon Schiele Art Centrum in Český Krumlov (2003–2004), Documenta in Kassel (2007) and Raven Row Gallery in London (2013). The artist herself wrote about her artificial negatives in her essay Jedna z cest (One of the Ways) (in: Vrh kostek: Česká experimentální poezie (A Throw of the Dice: Czech Experimental Poetry), Josef Hiršal, Bohumila Grögerová, Prague, Torst, 1993, pp. 207–220).Běla Kolářová (1923, Terezín–2010, Prague) is a self-educated artist. Having married renowned artist Jiří Kolář in 1949, she became part of the Czech experimental, neoconstructivist artist circles. Kolářová and her husband were founding members of the art group Křižovatka (Crossroads), active from 1963 to 1968. During the 1960s, she took part in several important group exhibitions (Křižovatka, 1964; Surrealism and Photography, 1966-1967; New Sensitivity, 1968). In 1968, she had her first solo exhibition in the Gallery on the Charles Square. However, she remained the shadow of her husband and was burdened with securing their financial well-being, only dedicating herself to art in her free time. After the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Kolářová was banned from exhibiting. In 1979, she and her husband left for East Berlin, where Kolář received a year-long scholarship. While Kolář subsequently emigrated to Paris, Kolářová returned to Prague to save his collection and artworks, which she gradually sent to France. She only received a travel permit in 1985; she and her husband would eventually return to the Czech Republic in 1999. After 1989, numerous retrospective exhibitions of her work were held in the Czech Republic and abroad. She received significant international acclaim in 2007 at Documenta 12 Kassel in 2007. Her international recognition was subsequently bolstered by two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, titled Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980 (2014) and Making Space: Woman Artists and Postwar Abstraction (2017). Her work is currently held in the collections of numerous Czech and international institutions including the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.