Jan Kolata
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Jan Kolata: "Grands Formats"
Catalogued solo exhibition
30 March - 21 April 2018
Jan Kolata is a German artist born in 1949. He started and completed his university studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf between 1970 and 1977.
After several artistic residencies in Russia, France, Norway, Slovenia and Switzerland, Jan Kolata became a teacher and continued his career as a painter.
He belongs to the German school of painting, which practices an abstract art that is immediately perceived thanks to the emotion aroused by the arrangement of shapes and the assembly of colours on the canvas. It is his talent as a colourist that first strikes one when discovering a work by Jan Kolata. Then comes a second reading, in which one wonders about the way in which the whole is composed. How much of it is random and how much of it is the result of a desire to intertwine one form with another. In contrast to Katharina Grosse, whose studio he worked in for many years, Jan Kolata places the paint on the canvas with great care. The abstraction is composed layer by layer, with one layer appearing transparently beneath another and finally all coming to the fore. This often sought-after affect flattens out the material and the arranged varnish gives a fascinating feeling of impression. This entire technique is the result of experiments conducted by Jan Kolata since the 1970s. And for those who were not lucky enough to attend his ten-year course at the Dortmund School of Fine Arts, Jan Kolata discusses his practice and approach to painting in detail in a book entitled Malstrom, (Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf) published at the end of 2017 (English - German texts).
Le Feuvre & Roze Gallery has represented Jan Kolata in France since December 2016. Grands Formats, his first solo exhibition at the gallery - which is also his first solo exhibition in France - is held from 20 March to 21 April 2018. Some twenty large-scale works (190 x 190 cm and 180 x 140 cm, in particular) will reveal the new directions in which Jan Kolata's work is heading.
