Untitled, 1978
Dalibor Chatrný
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2017 | Photo: Galerie Hunt Kastner
Collection
Found color print and ink
22 x 40 cm
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.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Chatrný began to reflect on the relationship between the artist and his environment. Initially, he created works in which he punctured or perforated canvases – these led him to briefly experiment with gridded perforations covering surfaces of photographs or canvases, and later the integration of string as a connective element between the perforations. In these two color works, created in 1976 and 1978, Chatrný continues this progression, examining the nature of time and space by visualizing the connection between the artist, the elements, and the phenomena of the third plane that is inherent in a two-dimensional image. Moving between the calculated thinking of a scientist and a poet’s natural intuition, he explored organic and inorganic processes, uniting them in wholly unique spatial experiments. – Alicia Reuter
*1925 in Brno, Czech Republic | † 2012 in Rajhrad u Brna, Czech Republic
22 x 40 cm
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.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Chatrný began to reflect on the relationship between the artist and his environment. Initially, he created works in which he punctured or perforated canvases – these led him to briefly experiment with gridded perforations covering surfaces of photographs or canvases, and later the integration of string as a connective element between the perforations. In these two color works, created in 1976 and 1978, Chatrný continues this progression, examining the nature of time and space by visualizing the connection between the artist, the elements, and the phenomena of the third plane that is inherent in a two-dimensional image. Moving between the calculated thinking of a scientist and a poet’s natural intuition, he explored organic and inorganic processes, uniting them in wholly unique spatial experiments. – Alicia Reuter
*1925 in Brno, Czech Republic | † 2012 in Rajhrad u Brna, Czech Republic