Jiří Kolář
Collage with an Ermine
19 October 2012–27January 2013
Opening: 18 October, 6pm
MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow
Poland, Krakow, Lipowa 4
Curator: Maria Anna Potocka
Jiří Kolář’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.
Also opening on 18 October 2012:
Fluxus
The Lunatics Are on the Loose…
An exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Fluxus, the international network of artists. The goal of the exhibition is to highlight the overview of the Fluxus activities during its European festivals organised in the ’60s and ’70s.
Marks of Memory:
Anita Glesta
Guernica
Wojciech Wilczyk
Post-industrial Spaces
The exhibitions Guernica and Post-industrial Spaces are part of the project Marks of Memory. The concept of memory is crucial in both exhibitions. However, each takes on board a different aspect of memory. The title Marks of Memory is ambiguous. On the one hand, it relates to the desire to remember and record a particular event or a place; on the other, it alludes to the excoriating effects of the painful memories that we retain.