Permanent exhibition

Stanislav Kolíbal (* 1925) is one of the most significant figures of Czech post-war art. In the context of world art, one can find parallels in his work to American minimalism and Italian arte povera, but his work grows from different roots and develops in the spirit of its own internal logic. Kolíbal, as demonstrated by his book illustrations and early works, is a sovereign draughtsman and model maker, but since the 1960s, questions of geometry and space have been central to his drawings and sculptures. The core of his work, however, is not form in itself but the tension between order and chance, duration and transience, being and emptiness.

Meda Mládek, the founder of Museum Kampa, has followed and collected Kolíbal’s work since her first visits to socialist Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. She purchased the artist’s works through the state-run Art Center as well as the New York based gallery OK Harris, where Kolíbal had four individual exhibitions during the 1980s. Not all of the works that she acquired over the years became part of Museum Kampa, but it is nonetheless a fairly large and representative collection, with a focus on drawings and sculptures from the 1970s.

The Stanislav Kolíbal 100 exhibition is a reminder of the artist’s upcoming 100th birthday, which he will celebrate in December. The exhibition is planned to run until at least February of next year and its composition will be renewed during its run in order to present Kolíbal’s works as widely as possible. The connection with the permanent exhibition of paintings by František Kupka is quite deliberate, although the link between Kupka’s abstractions and Kolíbal’s works is not direct. Stanislav Kolíbal, like Kupka, is one of the true world artists of Czech origin.