An intellectual both cosmopolitan and enduringly grafted into the history and traditions at the root of contemporary Europe, a masterful interpreter of that cultural disquietude which connoted the 20th century, Jiří Kolář is the protagonist of a noteworthy exhibition event at the Museo di Pittura Murale in San Domenico and Galleria Open Art, both of Prato. Curated by Francesca Pola and Mauro Stefanini, produced in cooperation with Galleria Open Art and showing more than 150 works, the exhibition is the first wide-ranging retrospective to be dedicated to Kolář, in Italy, since his death in 2002. The exhibition aims to present his creative language in all its extraordinary topicality and fresh inventiveness.

For Kolář, images are the ideal substrate on which to condense the complexity of human thought: it on this grate that fragments and traces of culture, art and communication catch and mix – talking fractals of the landscape of the world. He builds them according to a canon of destruction, by radical techniques harking to the practice of collage, inflected in an almost inexhaustible proliferation of operational variants. He catches the nuances of the ‘becoming’ of the world itself, its dynamics of union and separation, composition and conflict, to regenerate it over and over again. This is the art of Jiři Kolář: a workshop of imagination which opens its doors and lays out for our view – with crystalline exactitude and inexhaustible abundance – the pages of the rhythm of life itself, the authentic and profound sighing breath of the world.