HANNOVER.- With the works of Viktor Kolář (* 1941 in Ostrava) the Sprengel Museum Hannover is presenting one of the outstanding Czech photographers of the present day in what is his first ever museum exhibition in Germany. Approximately 40 photographs from five decades introduce the visitor to a fascinating oeuvre, an oeuvre in which the documentary and the poetical relate to one another in a most extraordinary way.

The focal point and central motif of Viktor Kolář’s oeuvre is his native city of Ostrava. That is where he, the son of a photographer and film maker, began to take his own photographs during the 1950s. This Moravian industrial city of the River Oder was also the place to which he returned after five years abroad: between 1968 and 1973 he had been living and working – as a miner, photo lab assistant and photographer – in Canada and the USA in consequence of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces.

Kolář has remained faithful to black-and-white photography and is more interested in the complex composition of the individual photograph than in serial forms of photography. In 1964 – having just graduated with a degree in education – he had his first exhibition of photography with images of children playing in the street and of the industrially scarred landscape on the outskirts of Ostrava. While early influences on his work were the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), the influence of the photography of the Czech avant-garde never seems far away, and the surrealism inspired by André Breton (1896– 1966) lives on in Kolářs documentary photographs of soot-shrouded slag heaps, of snowwhite washing hanging on a clothesline against a background of railway trucks discharging molten steel, and of lonely girls and men making their respective solitary ways through the city: it is not least in everyday life that the photographer espies its inherently surreal quality. But there is nothing disconcerting about Kolář’s photography – one is rather confronted by a comforting mood of resistance and hope.

Viktor Kolář has been teaching at the Prague FAMU since 1994. His works have meanwhile been shown in countless international exhibitions – at the Art Institute of Chicago or the International Center of Photography in New York, for example. A large retrospective of his work took place at the Prague City Gallery in 2013.