Lot 152

Jan Koblasa (1932 - 2017) UNTITLED

From the expert opinion of PhDr. Mahulena Nešlehová: "The painting presents a dark green-blue oval silhouette of a face, set in a bright golden rectangular light field, embedded in a darkened pictorial space. Judging by the manner of execution and the emphasis placed on the importance of light, the work was probably created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In its choice of colours and the effect of the light formation, this work is reminiscent of Koblas's large-scale painting Me and Lolita (1960, Regional Museum in Teplice). But unlike that painting, which was inspired by the experience of the so-called new music, here we perceive a different, existentially focused intention. It is a representation of a direct "dialogue" of the artist with the malleable matter of the painting. Through spontaneous engraved lines and expressive interventions and gestures, we observe a record of the artist's psychological state of mind, transposed into the coloured matter of the silhouetted abbreviation of the face - the mass of illuminated anxiety and distress is tempered and redeemed by a golden luminous glow. This is the key image that foreshadowed the subsequent structurally conceived cycle of five paintings, Veronica's Veil, from 1961, but its profundity also stimulated Koblas's other abstract works created at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s (Head from 1959, Mock-up of My Brain from 1961, and the monotypes Diagram of My Brain from 1962). As can be seen from the above, the painting, whose name we unfortunately do not know, opened up an unexpectedly wide field of activity for the artist, and this is where the importance of this work lies."