Josef Bolf
Car
Artist
Josef Bolf
(1971, Praha), Czech
Original Title
Auto
From the seriesFaces
Date2002-2004
Mediumwatercolour and indian ink on paper
Classifications
drawings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionJosef Bolf is one of the most distinctive artists in contemporary Czech painting. His paintings are inhabited by wounded and frightened creatures, half-human and half-animal. The depicted situations elicit feelings of sadness, revulsion, and vulnerability, which draw on the author’s depressive states as well as the artist’s personal experience of growing up on an unfinished suburb of Prague’s South End during the era of Normalisation, when the collective unconscious resonated with the potential threats of the Cold War. Bolf came on the art scene in the late 1990s and early 00s, and succeeded in rehabilitating and innovating existential figural works by connecting the theme of his own childhood with the aesthetics of pulp genres – comics, cheap horrors, naive sci-fi stories, and video games. He also used inferior materials and children’s artistic techniques. Later, his stylisation became more classical, but his works are still populated by the same childhood heroes who find themselves in the inhuman scenery of panel-house architecture whose concrete facade and malfunctioning infrastructure create a sense of irreverence for the human scale. The personal, autobiographical line thus merges with inspirational vectors derived from pop culture, art, literature, but also psychoanalysis, and opens up vistas of collective memory. His work seems to re-play scenes from one and the same story, but possess an inner focus and the promise of personal revitalisation. The works from recent years, which largely show the overlapping and collaging of motifs and their complicated layering, departs from the sense of personal projection in favor of depicting the chaos of the contemporary world, full of catastrophe and the human individual’s psychological malaise.
The large collection fragmentarily covers Bolf’s cycles of drawings from various creative periods (Narapoia, 2002; Obličeje (Faces), 2002–2004; Velké obličeje (Large Faces), 2005; Spolužáci (Classmates), 2008; Obličeje (Faces), 2013–2014). The first portrait cycles started being made after a short creative break in 2002, and in the context of his work they represent a spontaneous process of automatic or semi-automatic creation. They are related to the genre of comics which played a central role in his work as a representative of low-brow or inferior genres. They are however stand-alone works of art and, in contrast to his more complex paintings, express a certain kind of exposure or auto-portraiture, as they manifest a subjective form of expression which stems from the author’s inner need to externalise unconscious experiences. The drawings regularly adopt the guise of his painting stylisations, but always show portraits of children’s or half-animal faces, oftentimes with bodily mutations or brutal physical deformities.
Josef Bolf (*1971, Prague) studied at the the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and completed scholarships at Kongsthögskolan in Stockholm and the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and in 2007 he completed a residency in New York (international Studio and Curatorial Program). At the end of the 1990s he became a member of his peer group Bezhlavý Jezdec whose members often worked in conceptual art and the moving image, which is a medium Bolf himself occasionally employs. In 2005 he was among the finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and his work regularly appears at important exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art. Since 2018, he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and he had a solo exhibition in 2019 at the Prague City Gallery.
The large collection fragmentarily covers Bolf’s cycles of drawings from various creative periods (Narapoia, 2002; Obličeje (Faces), 2002–2004; Velké obličeje (Large Faces), 2005; Spolužáci (Classmates), 2008; Obličeje (Faces), 2013–2014). The first portrait cycles started being made after a short creative break in 2002, and in the context of his work they represent a spontaneous process of automatic or semi-automatic creation. They are related to the genre of comics which played a central role in his work as a representative of low-brow or inferior genres. They are however stand-alone works of art and, in contrast to his more complex paintings, express a certain kind of exposure or auto-portraiture, as they manifest a subjective form of expression which stems from the author’s inner need to externalise unconscious experiences. The drawings regularly adopt the guise of his painting stylisations, but always show portraits of children’s or half-animal faces, oftentimes with bodily mutations or brutal physical deformities.
Josef Bolf (*1971, Prague) studied at the the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and completed scholarships at Kongsthögskolan in Stockholm and the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and in 2007 he completed a residency in New York (international Studio and Curatorial Program). At the end of the 1990s he became a member of his peer group Bezhlavý Jezdec whose members often worked in conceptual art and the moving image, which is a medium Bolf himself occasionally employs. In 2005 he was among the finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and his work regularly appears at important exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art. Since 2018, he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and he had a solo exhibition in 2019 at the Prague City Gallery.
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