Jiri Kolar

JIRI KOLAR (Protivin, Czech Republic, 1914 – Prague, 2002).
Untitled, 1992, from the “Olympic Centennial Suite.”
Silkscreen print on 270-gram Vélin d’Arches paper, edition E.A. 68/250.
Signed and numbered by hand.
Measurements: 90 x 63 cm.

The Olympic Suite consists of 50 lithographs and silkscreen prints selected to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centennial of the modern Olympic movement. The selected artists work in a wide variety of movements and styles, ranging from Antonio López’s hyperrealism to Sol Lewitt’s abstraction, including Abstract Expressionism, Arden Quin’s Geometrism, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, the New Realism of Baldaccini and Rotella, and the New Fauvism of Dokoupil, among others. Among the artists represented are creators of great international renown, widely recognized by critics.

Born into a working-class family, Jiri Kolar moved to Prague in 1945, where he first worked as an editor before devoting himself to poetry and the creation of collages. Kolar’s artistic language is influenced by Surrealism and Poetism (a Czech avant-garde poetic movement), with particular emphasis on his “rollages”—a technique involving the lamination of major works of art into strips, which are then reconstructed from a new perspective. However, the communists’ rise to power in Czechoslovakia prevented Kolar from freely exhibiting and publishing his works. In fact, in 1950 he was imprisoned for publishing a text titled “The Liver of Prometheus,” which challenged the prevailing ideology of the time, closely linked to Socialist Realism. After a period of political activism, Kolar emigrated to France, where he remained until the fall of communism in 1989, regaining his Czech passport in 1992. Throughout his career as an artist, Jiri Kolar has held numerous exhibitions in both Europe and the United States, most notably the one held in 1881 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.