Lot 198

Jiří Kolář (1914 - 2002) APPLE

Jiří Kolář's work is expressed on the art scene in an extraordinary way. He was a member of Group 42, UB, and Křižovatka. He represented an authority and a personality around whom various artists and intellectuals gathered. He coordinated multiple activities, such as the samizdat edition of Petlice, and in 1977 he signed Charter 77. From 1980 he lived with his wife Bela in Paris, where together with other Czech emigrants he supported the publication of the Revue K. He transformed himself from a poet into an artist, giving the word a three-dimensional form, turning everyday objects into poems. The apple motif is pervasive in Kolář's work, probably as an artifact that symbolizes the beginning and the end, a binary opposition. The offered object is processed using the chiasma technique and is subtly divided into two hemispheres, one composed of scraps of musical notation, the other of foreign language text. Kolář's most significant spatial works also include a two-meter diameter apple object entitled In the beginning was the word from 1969, which is in the collections of the Neues Museum Nürnberg. The offered work comes from a private collection in the Netherlands.