Il poeta del collage

Jiří Kolář

From 23 March to 16 May 2017

The MAAB Gallery is pleased to present a solo show by Jiří Kolář, Il poeta del collage, in its exhibition rooms in Via Nerino 3, Milan.

Through a selection of more than twenty works made between the 1960s and the 1990s, the exhibition will give an overview of the career of this Czech artist (Protovín 1914 – Prague 2002).

Jiří Kolář was always fascinated by typographic fonts. The author of essays and poetry, this versatile artist transformed collage into a genuine science. A technique with ancient origins, it was only widely diffused in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century when it was utilised by the Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. In Kolář’s work collage has a wide range of possible variants, all listed by the artist himself in his Dictionnaire des méthodes, which he completed in 1983.

Collages, such as Senza titolo – Omaggio a Nefertiti (1987), in which the image of the famous Egyptian queen is fragmented into a series of equal strips that were then recomposed into a new figurative whole, or chiasmages, amongst which Preghiera per la misericordia (1984) where there are traces of religious texts in Latin, or lintons, such as Il gioco celato (1974), all reveal Kolář’s creative world to the viewers: a world populated by extracts from musical scores and religious texts, snippets of well-known paintings and sculptures, and traces of everyday life, all of which recount our history through images.

The exhibition is complemented by a bilingual catalogue (Italian and English) containing an essay by Gianluca Ranzi.

Press release