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Jiří Kolář

Butterfly

Butterfly
Butterfly
Butterfly
Artist (1914, Protivín - 2002, Praha), Czech
Original Title Butterfly
Date1980-1990
Mediumcollage on paper
Dimensions20 × 22,5 cm
Classificationscollages
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionJiří Kolář was a prominent Czech poet and visual artist who received international recognition as soon as the 1960s. He entered the art scene at the age of thirty, as a poet and writer influenced by surrealism. His first important works were the journal records Years in Days (1947), which presented a raw, ironic reaction to the most concrete reality of the surrounding world. The concept of daily, regular (journal-based) expression subsequently became an integral part of his lifelong artistic practice. His writings, such as The Genor Clan, Prometheus’s Liver, and The Jubilant Cemetery (all 1950) explored the impact of the Stalinist and Gottwaldian eras on the life of individuals. Although poetry forms a bedrock of Kolář’s oeuvre, his approach is defined by a rejection of conventional poetry. Kolář’s definitive split with the spheres of language and literature is represented by the typewritten poetry collection Poems of Silence (1959–1961), which takes the form of typograms. Soon thereafter, Kolář began exclusively working with visual imagery, which was shaped both by his poetic ability to create metaphors and his tendency toward destroying original wholes and reassembling them in collages. Kolář usually created his collages by cutting or tearing up and subsequently recomposing colour prints of old and new images, as well as reportage and fashion photographs. He used these fragments to create new juxtapositions, often incorporating and appropriating classical art imagery and prominent visual motifs from human history. Loss of the material’s original meaning is a natural part of the process, which simultaneously provides the opportunity to construct new pictorial realities which function as parables of the contemporary of affairs. The viewer’s understanding of these compositions is also significantly shaped by their titles. Kolář’s multivocal, protean artistic practice shares links with existentialism, letterism, neo-constructivism, and New Sensitivity while also anticipating the postmodern principles of quotation, postproduction, and appropriation. Between 1959 and 1963, Kolář developed a range of new collage techniques—dubbed, for instance, roláž, chiasmáž, muchláž, proláž—which helped him create varied imagery from raw visual materials throughout the following decades. From the mid-1960s onward, Kolář also made three-dimensional collages incorporating mundane objects related to the era of his childhood. In his Týdeníky (“Weeklies”), published between 1967 and 1968, he commented on the important events of the past week. These publications combined different types of material and information, providing a tangible image of the contemporary milieu.

Butterflies is a set of four collages. Each depicts two butterflies
made using Kolař’s “proláž” technique. Their contours are cut out of imagery such as easter eggs in a contemporary lifestyle magazine, a reproduction of a baroque canvas with a religious motif, graphics of old Prague, and vernacular religious images. Kolář developed this technique based on the influences Dadaists and René Magritte, using metaphorical images to express his poetic vision as well as to reflect the contemporary world and the growing amount of available visual materials.

Jiří Kolář (1914, Protivín – 2002, Prague) spent his youth in Kladno. A self-taught artist, Kolář initially trained as a joiner and later spent time working as a manual labourer. He first exhibited his collages in 1937, on the corridor walls of the E. F. Burian Theatre in Prague. These works were based on the concept of liberated words, which intentionally negate established syntactic relations and logical units of meaning. He became a member of the Czech wartime art group Group 42, whose programmatic focus on the urban periphery was set out in Jinřích Chalupecký’s essay The World We Live In (1940). Kolář joined the group as a poet, and his poems from this time (Odes and Variations, 1941–1944; Limb and Other Poems, 1944–1945) can be understood as manifestations of the group’s aesthetics. In 1949, he married Běla Helclová (Kolářová), who would become a famous artist and photographer. In 1953, Kolář was arrested by the State Security Service for his work Prometheus’s Liver, a culmination of his tumultuous relation with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He subsequently spent the 1950s in forced cultural isolation, without contact with contemporary and international affairs. In 1963, he was one of the main initiators of the art group Křižovatka, which had its debut exhibition in the same year at the Václav Špála Gallery. Kolář later had a solo exhibition at the gallery in 1968. In the latter half of the 1960s, he primarily exhibited abroad, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the USA. During this time, he featured in important exhibitions such as Between Poetry and Painting (Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1965), Tschechoslowakische Kunst der Gegenwart (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1966), documenta 4 v Kasselu (1968), the Expo 70 – Czechoslovak Pavillion (Osaka, 1970), the 35th Venice Biennale (1970), and documenta 6 in Kassel (1977). The most momentous recognitions of his work included solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1975 and 1979, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1938, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 1996. Despite his international success, Kolář could not exhibit in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s, and no books were published addressing his work. In 1970, he suffered a stroke, leaving half of his body temporarily paralyzed. After recovering, he returned to his artistic practice. In 1977, Kolář signed the Charter 77 and was subsequently banned from working in Czechoslovakia. Between 1979 and 1980 he spent a year in West Berlin thanks to the DAAD residency programme, and subsequently emigrated to Paris. In 1982, he was sentenced in absentia to a year of jail in Czechoslovakia and to loss of property. In 1984, he received French citizenship. In (former) Czechoslovakia, his work was only first presented in 1993, when the National Gallery Prague hosted a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Kinský Palace. Important recent retrospectives have included Jiří Kolář: Grimace of the Century, Kinský Palace, Prague (2018) and Jiří Kolář: Forms of Visual Poetry, From the Collection of Museum Kampa (American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, Washington D. C., 2019). After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Kolář began to engage with the cultural life of the Czech Republic, eventually moving back to Prague in 1997. In 1990, Jiří Kolář, Václav Havel, and Theodor Pištěk co-founded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for artists under the age of 35.
Butterfly
Jiří Kolář
1980-1990
Butterfly
Jiří Kolář
1980-1990
Butterfly
Jiří Kolář
1980-1990
The Week Keeps Repeating Itself
Běla Kolářová
1979
Variations to Two Triangles I
Běla Kolářová
1968
As: Another Seven
Dick Higgins
1979
Visual Poems
Dick Higgins
1979
Dream
Toyen
1937
Diver
Toyen
1926