Untitled
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- Untitled
- Bez názvu
- 1960s
- collage, string on cardboard
- 30,3 × 21,5 cm
This work, comprised of a knotted piece of white string affixed to black cardboard, is among Kolář’s most reductive pieces in a formal sense and is closely related to his early-1960s “Knot Poems.” According to his own statements, Kolář—having read a 1961 survey indicating that half of humanity was illiterate—was attempting to create a poem such as might be written by an illiterate person. Yet whereas the majority of his “Knot Poems”—modeled after the Inca knot language known as “kipu”—consist of a set of vertical, hanging strings where both the numbers and relative positions of the knots are significant, this untitled work consists of a single string with eight knots tied at differing intervals. It hence appears most closely related to the similarly reductive “Noose” (1960), now held by the Neues Museum Nürnberg, as both works illustrate Kolář’s view that everything “starts from a knot upon the swaddling band and ends with the noose.” K.C.