Letters From Portugal

A key figure in Prague intellectual circles in the 1960s, Kolarova used photography, collage, and assemblage to explore the strangeness and beauty of ordinary domestic objects--paper clips, matches, needles, nails, and hair clippings. As she wrote in an artist's statement in 1968, her work focused on "a world so negligable and everyday as if past the merit of being photographed; small things, indispensable for our life yet taken for granted so that we hardly notice them in spite of their great number, things which, to our annoyance, assert their existence at the very moment of their demise." This two photograph of clippings of her own hair suggests a type of secret writing, a formal calligraphy hidden within objects themselves. Although long overshadowed by the work of her husband, the influential Czech artist and poet Jiri Kolar, Kolarova has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years.