- Condition: **
- Year: 2020-05-13
Jiří Kolář’s 1980 work Object/Chiasmage
Jiří Kolář (24 September 1914, Protivín – 11 August 2002, Prague) was an experimental and visual poet, playwright, translator, art collector, and patron of samizdat literature and young artists. He was one of the most important Czech artists and creator of numerous original art techniques. In the late 1940s, Kolář began to support some artists and authors. He gradually stopped writing at the end of the 1950s. At first, he kept a photographic diary, experimented with so-called concrete poetry, replaced words with objects or pictures, and gradually moved on to collages. Since his first exhibition abroad in 1963, his works were displayed at many prestigious exhibitions, such as Between Poetry and Painting, London Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965; Documenta, Kassel, 1968; 10th Sao Paulo Biennale, 1969; Osaka Expo, 1970; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, 1979, 1985. In 1968, he founded the Jiří Kolář Award, which he himself awarded. During the normalisation period after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he sponsored the publishing of the samizdat Petlice Edition and the Petlice Edition Awards. In 1990, at the initiative of Jiří Kolář, Václav Havel and Theodor Pištěk, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award was established in memory of the prominent theoretician. Jiří Kolář died in Prague on 11 August 2002.