Untitled, 1976
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2017 | Photo: Galerie Hunt Kastner
Collection
From the series of Reduced Portraits
Found black and white photography collage on paper
40 x 14.7 cm
46 x 31 cm (framed)
In the Czech Republic, beginning in the 1960s, Dalibor Chatrný was among the first in a generation that tested their ties with post-war abstract art. Throughout his decades-long career, Chatrný extensively experimented with a number of mediums – among them collages, photography, grid work, audio-visual arrangements, magnetic field compositions, textiles, and painting – one of the permanent themes of his practice was the articulation of space and spatial relationships.
In these black and white works, all created during the same artistic period in the late 1970s, the artist altered found photographs by excising the central segment, thus reestablishing the original spatial composition. This elementary solution is paradoxical, bordering on comical, producing a work that is a fragment of the original, yet compels the viewer to deduce, even reconstruct, the image in its entirety. As comprehensive early examples of the artist’s lifelong interest in the transformation space and perception, these works are meditations on the phenomena of poetic reduction, effacement, and, ultimately, abstraction. – Alicia Reuter
*1925 in Brno, Czech Republic | † 2012 in Rajhrad u Brna, Czech Republic
Found black and white photography collage on paper
40 x 14.7 cm
46 x 31 cm (framed)
In the Czech Republic, beginning in the 1960s, Dalibor Chatrný was among the first in a generation that tested their ties with post-war abstract art. Throughout his decades-long career, Chatrný extensively experimented with a number of mediums – among them collages, photography, grid work, audio-visual arrangements, magnetic field compositions, textiles, and painting – one of the permanent themes of his practice was the articulation of space and spatial relationships.
In these black and white works, all created during the same artistic period in the late 1970s, the artist altered found photographs by excising the central segment, thus reestablishing the original spatial composition. This elementary solution is paradoxical, bordering on comical, producing a work that is a fragment of the original, yet compels the viewer to deduce, even reconstruct, the image in its entirety. As comprehensive early examples of the artist’s lifelong interest in the transformation space and perception, these works are meditations on the phenomena of poetic reduction, effacement, and, ultimately, abstraction. – Alicia Reuter
*1925 in Brno, Czech Republic | † 2012 in Rajhrad u Brna, Czech Republic