Běla Kolářová
Vending Machine for Eating Money
Artist
Běla Kolářová
(1923, Terezín - 2010, Praha), Czech
Original Title
Automat na polykání peněz
Date1966
Mediumassemblage (technical components, plastic fish)
Dimensions80 × 60 cm
Classifications
sculpture
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionBěla 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.
This assemblage titled Automaton for Swallowing Money (1966) was created in the same year in which Běla Kolářová had her first solo exhibition at Prague’s Charles Square Gallery, organized by Ludmila Vachtová. At the time, Kolářová was incorporating mundane objects into her assemblages. These included snap fasteners, hair pins, razors, beads, and plastic items, the use of which commonly pertained to the household and the “women’s” world with its stereotypically gendered activities. These pieces are thus substantially different from traditional assemblages based on work with geometric structure and single-type objects which do not represent anything beyond their material presence. Kolářová’s work transforms the neutral structure of the geometric grid into a looser, object-based variant. The metal nails are arranged to form a stylized face-machine which is augmented by an orange plastic toy fish, a Czechoslovak Crown coin, and a magazine cut-out depicting a parrot. The playful combination of varied objects and their composition into an imaginative, narrational configuration evidence a strong influence of European variants of pop art and reflects the atmosphere of the Czech cultural scene in the mid-1960s as it reacted to faint echoes of consumer society. In Kolářová’s unique adaptation of pop art aesthetics, we can see, on the one hand, a parallel with the interests of her partner, Jiří Kolář (1914–2002), in popular culture and mass-disseminated reproductions, and, on the other hand, a reception of contemporary international tendencies. Within this context, it is interesting to consider her immediate reaction to the Prague showing of the exhibition Narrative Figuration (1966) which took place in the Václav Špála Gallery and presented various contemporary movements of the Parisian art scene. Kolářová’s style is most similar to new realism, which can be understood as a European version of pop art imbued with a neo-dadaist air and symbolisms of everyday life.
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.
This assemblage titled Automaton for Swallowing Money (1966) was created in the same year in which Běla Kolářová had her first solo exhibition at Prague’s Charles Square Gallery, organized by Ludmila Vachtová. At the time, Kolářová was incorporating mundane objects into her assemblages. These included snap fasteners, hair pins, razors, beads, and plastic items, the use of which commonly pertained to the household and the “women’s” world with its stereotypically gendered activities. These pieces are thus substantially different from traditional assemblages based on work with geometric structure and single-type objects which do not represent anything beyond their material presence. Kolářová’s work transforms the neutral structure of the geometric grid into a looser, object-based variant. The metal nails are arranged to form a stylized face-machine which is augmented by an orange plastic toy fish, a Czechoslovak Crown coin, and a magazine cut-out depicting a parrot. The playful combination of varied objects and their composition into an imaginative, narrational configuration evidence a strong influence of European variants of pop art and reflects the atmosphere of the Czech cultural scene in the mid-1960s as it reacted to faint echoes of consumer society. In Kolářová’s unique adaptation of pop art aesthetics, we can see, on the one hand, a parallel with the interests of her partner, Jiří Kolář (1914–2002), in popular culture and mass-disseminated reproductions, and, on the other hand, a reception of contemporary international tendencies. Within this context, it is interesting to consider her immediate reaction to the Prague showing of the exhibition Narrative Figuration (1966) which took place in the Václav Špála Gallery and presented various contemporary movements of the Parisian art scene. Kolářová’s style is most similar to new realism, which can be understood as a European version of pop art imbued with a neo-dadaist air and symbolisms of everyday life.
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.
