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The artist Stanislav Kolíbal (born 1925) represents the Czech Republic this year at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In autumn 2018, together with Dieter Bogner as curator, Stanislav Kolíbal won the competition for the Czech-Slovakian Pavilion awarded by the Prague National Gallery on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. The commission agent was Adam Budak, National Gallery in Prague.
Since the early 1960s, Stanislav Kolíbal has been developing an individual language of forms, the conceptual approach of which reflects the recurring, profound changes in his social and political milieu. His two and three-dimensional works blur the lines between painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture. They move between illusion and reality, and explore aspects of fragility in the dialectical relationship between perfection and imperfection, stability and instability, certainty and uncertainty. The ambiguous poetic character of the exhibition’s title is based on a conceptual installation of Kolíbal from the 1970s, and indicates the artist’s position in relation to time, life, and art.
The exhibition combines central sculptures of the 1960s and wall installations of the 1970s with a new ten-metre-long wall design and a large relief-like room drawing in front of the pavilion, which was also created for the Biennale.
For the exhibition, an English-language, comprehensive catalogue has been published in which Dieter Bogner portrays Kolíbal’s life and artistic creativity from the 1930s to the present in a detailed biographical essay – a complex compilation of conversations with the artist, reports, manifestos and documents, and descriptions of all his creative phases. In the second part of the catalogue international curators and scientists analyse the different phases of Kolíbal’s work.
