Before Leaving

In the 1980s, Běla Kolářová followed up on several formal strategies that she had developed in the previous decades. One of these methods entailed drawing with make-up. In Before Leaving, she combined make-up drawing with collage that focuses on transposing a specific pictorial theme. The drawn motifs are loosely arranged in the bottom part of the print. Confronted with these motifs, the printed illustration taken from a fashion magazine is shed of the banality of its former context and takes part in the creation of different meanings. Kolářová thematizes the process of women’s self-adornment as a ritual form that may verge on obsession. Using these processes, she produces an open pictorial structure that helps to transform the semantic relationships that allude both to personal intimacy and the spheres of advertisement and social conventions.