Behind the Curtain Painting

In the remarkable evolution of Kolářová’s work over the last decade, she has harnessed and redirected these currents of Vienna Secession, Der Blaue Reiter, and symbolism along with fauvism, orphism, primitivism, and surrealism. There are visual ripples from Klimt, the Wiener Werkstätte, and Csontváry, also, from greater distances, Redon, the Delaunays, Dubuffet, and Miró. Clear influences by twentieth-century masters, and Czecho-Slovakness, is evident; and also an individual revelations of Kolařova as an artist in color and form. Kolářová’s art is distinctly East Central European but indelibly her own: sinuous, mystic, rich in color, intricate in detail, and inventive in its combinations of materials. Dragonfly (2008) captures a moment for a feverish insect as Klimt might have portrayed a coolly intellectual Viennese hostess. Tender (2010) is tensed between the painterly and naturalistic, between soothing colors and taut strokes. Schizophrenia (2012) combines humanity, linearity, and a haunting wound with deep textural pleasure. Each of Kolářová’s works makes one think, but never in a way coldly detached from the shapes and shades of real things or from paint and the joy of applying it. They confront crisis but explore beauty even in the midst of crisis. The golden dragonfly (2010) captures by the way it dominates the frame of the picture; its appearance of kineticness in a fixed medium; the detail (particularly of the wings), which is something artists often dispense with in abstractions; the focus of the palette; the contrasting energies of the verticals, horizontals, and spots and the way they also waver in their strength. Thinking about it, it is actually the detail on the body of the dragonfly that is more unusual and interesting. James Papp