Museum PR Announcements News and Information

MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art announces Jirí Kolar Collage with an Ermine

MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow announces Jirí Kolar Collage with an Ermine, on view 19 October 2012–27January 2013.

Jirí Kolar Lady with an Ermine (fragment), 1966. Rollage and chiasmage, courtesy of Neues Museum Nuremberg.

Jirí Kolar’s (1914–2002) exhibition at MOCAK will be the first presentation in Poland in many years of this outstanding Czech artist. Kolář, renown throughout the world for his visual work, was also a writer and a poet as well as a translator. His visual works, with their complex structure, reflect the wide range of the artist’s interests.

Kolář performed a destruction of the classical literary form, and, with time, his poems more and more resembled visual work. He almost completely abandoned writing in favour of the visual idiom, developing in many different ways the technique of collage. He defined and described his innovative work methods in his Slovník metod, published in 1979. Kolář’s works were usually a result of a juxtaposition of shredded or torn reproductions, printed material or musical scores. The works presented at the exhibition, from the Neues Museum für Kunst und Design in Nuremburg and the Museum Kampa in Prague, will demonstrate the wide range of techniques which the artist employed in his art, including chiasmages, rollages or prollages, as well as collage items. From the reproductions of old works the artist produced brand-new works, placing them in different cultural contexts, combining and confronting tradition and contemporaneity.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first Polish translation of The Eyewitness, Kolář’s post-war diary, published by MOCAK.

Curator: Maria Anna Potocka

MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow
Poland, Krakow, Lipowa 4
www.mocak.pl