The Prague sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal (b. 1925) is one of the most prominent post-WWII exponents of Czech art. Since the 1960s he has devoted himself to exploring the issues related to geometry as one of the foundation stones of European cultural and civilizational identity. The tension between abstract form and the existential significance of an artistic creation, and the issues of the permanence, stability and instability of sculptural forms, led to his works being included in an important exhibition - Between Man and Matter - in the Tokio Metropolitan Museum in 1970 (together with Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and others). To accentuate the contrast with his earlier sculptures and objects, he refers to his works created in 1988/89 in Berlin based on drawings and plans as "structures". Some of the pencil drawings later metamorphosed into three-dimensional constructions. In 1997 the National Gallery in Prague held a major retrospective of his work. Over the past twenty years Kolíbal has exhibited as a solo artist in Great Britain (College of Art in Edinburgh, 1998), Italy (Chiese Rupestri in Matera, 1999) and Germany (Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, 2000). The current exhibition concentrates on the "line - surface - space" domain, pointing out the individual differences in the approach to the space and the function of geometric principles in the work of Josef Hoffmann and Stanislav Kolíbal.
In cooperation with MAK Wien.
