Stanislav Kolíbal was born in 1925 in Orlová, near Český Těšín. After the Second World War he studied applied graphics at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, followed by scenography at the Academy of Performing Arts.

He has been exhibiting intensively since the turn of the 1950s and ’60s. The second half of the 1960s saw Kolíbal’s unprecedented success on the international art scene, with the exhibitions “Sculptures from Twenty Nations” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1967) and “Between Man and Matter” in Tokyo (1970). He continues to exhibit at some of the world’s most renowned institutions and has appeared at several group exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1983, 1995, 1997, 2002) and the Guggenheim in New York (“50 Years of Collecting”, 1987). He was also represented at “Transforming Chronologies” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2006, an exclusive selection of drawings from the museum’s collections. His works could also be seen at the “Zero” exhibitions of works from the Gerhard Lenz collection, among other places at the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art in 2006. He has also exhibited at large non-collecting institutions, including a solo exhibition at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen in 2000.

In terms of private galleries, he has had five exhibitions in New York (1975 at the Livingstone-Learmonth Gallery and four times at the OK Harris Gallery – 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987), plus four exhibitions at Munich’s Walter Storms Galerie (1979, 1984, 2006 and most recently in the autumn of 2013).

Kolíbal has been honored with large retrospectives in 1997 at Prague’s National Gallery and in 2012 at the Prague Castle Riding Hall. Other recent exhibitions include his participation in “Other Primary Structures”, a survey of art from the 1960s held at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Stanislav Kolíbal represented the Czech Republic at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.