Běla Kolářová

Běla Kolářová née Helclová (24 March 1923, in Terezín – 12 April 2010, in Prague) was a Czech artist and photographer. In 1949 she married Jiří Kolář (1914-2002). In 1985, she followed her husband in exile in Paris. They returned to Prague in 1999. She died in Prague on 12 April 2010.

Style Kolářová belongs to the generation which touched off an iconoclastic revolution and "rearmament" in Czech art during the 1960s. This new wave hit the scene with a program of objective tendencies, proclaiming that art can exist as a process, concept, method, experiment and language, or as something "concrete"—such as a found and designed object. Kolářová’s training is in photography, and her role in the 1960s reversal was associated with this medium from the beginning. As with many of her contemporaries, she arrived at the conclusion that it is not possible to photograph the world, i.e. to use classic methods of representing reality.

She therefore invented her own method and technology, the artificial negative. She pressed small objects into layers of paraffin on small pieces of cellophane, or she actually applied small fragments of natural and artificial materials. Instead of choosing the world that it is possible to photograph and represent as an exterior appearance, she chose the world that is possible to accept, to appropriate as an assemblage of material fragments, using light to transfer them into an autonomous picture on the sensitive surface of photographic paper.

Career Kolářová's work has been exhibited extensively since the 1960s. In 1966, the Gallery in Charles Square in Prague held her first solo exhibition. By the 1980s, Kolářová's work included more assemblages. In 1994, she participated in the group exhibition Europa, Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Europe, Europe. The Century of the Avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe) at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Her work continues to be exhibited posthumously.

Her work is owned by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the National Gallery in Prague, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Olomouc Museum of Art. In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired an early piece entitled "Letters From Portugal".