Jiří Kolář and Ladislav Novák: Homage to Flies Spiders Fish Mice and Dogs

Jiří Kolář

(24 September 1914, Protivín – 11 August 2002, Prague)

A poet of words and a poet of images, and one of the most distinctive cultural phenomena of the Czech and European cultural scene. Despite genuine and far-reaching hardships, his extraordinary civic and cultural engagement remains to this day an example of a positive commitment to art and culture.

We return to his work again and again, whether we perceive it as the sum of a modernist intellectual's spellbinding testimony — one firmly convinced of the purpose of art and cultural life — or as evidence of boundless visual creativity. Kolář's poems are saturated with images, just as his visual work draws on the poetics of words and the poetry of pictures alike. He elevated the technique of collage into the most exquisite visual virtuosity.

Ladislav Novák

(4 August 1925, Turnov – 28 July 1999, Třebíč)

The name of Ladislav Novák belongs not only to the world of poetry but equally to the world of visual art, and within the Central European context it is quite singular. His creative foundations rest not on the pursuit of outward beauty, but on a deep exploration of the relationship between human consciousness and the elusive energy of chaos.

He drew on the principles of surrealist chance above all in his froissages — crumpled sheets of paper in which the individual folds created a random structure that he would then develop further — as well as in his so-called muchlages, veronages, and alchymages. A person profoundly bound to art, he had been publishing poetry since the mid-1940s, and in the 1960s, when his visual work began, and throughout the following decade, he devoted himself equally to actions and texts for happenings.

The city of Třebíč, where he worked for many years, repaid its debt to him after his death by opening the Ladislav Novák Gallery, which has been in operation since 2002. Despite working outside the major artistic centres, he came to be placed within international contexts during his lifetime, particularly in Italy and France; an important companion and advocate was the distinguished Czech art and literary theorist, critic, art historian, and essayist Jindřich Chalupecký.