Josef Bolf
Blue Bubbles
Artist
Josef Bolf
(1971, Praha), Czech
Original Title
Blue Bubbles
Date2004
Mediumacrylic, self-adhesive plastic foil and colored shellac on plastic board
Dimensions91 × 135 cm
Classificationspaintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha (Eva and Petr Zeman Collection)
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.
Blue Bubbles (2004) is part of Bolf’s cycle of abstract paintings. These fully abstract works provided him with a space for experimentation. In their creation, Bolf used adhesive plastic foil, painting over it with glue and colored shellacs, which he would subsequently light on fire and leave to pour freely around the surface. In their psychedelic character, peculiar color palettes, and resemblance of organic shapes, these works differed from most contemporary abstract art and evidenced Bolf’s effort to liberate himself from conventional understandings of painting, which he newly sought to approach as a space for expressing his emotional state. Such works were influenced by the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium. During this time, Bolf developed an interest in various subcultures and in comic book aesthetics, which had not yet been incorporated into art within then Czech context.
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 National Gallery Prague (A Premonition of Shadow, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace). Bolf has also had solo exhibitions abroad, for instance in Slovakia (White and Weiss Gallery, Bratislava, 2022), France (Galerie Dukan, Paris, 2011, 2016), Hungary (Trafo Gallery, Budapest, 2015), German (Galerie Dukan, Leipzig, 2014), China (Arcaute – Arte Contemporáneo, Beijing, 2012, 2013), Switzerland (Arthobler Gallery, Zurich, 2013), and the USA (Ana Cristea Gallery, New York City, 2010) Many of his works are held in institutional and private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad.
Blue Bubbles (2004) is part of Bolf’s cycle of abstract paintings. These fully abstract works provided him with a space for experimentation. In their creation, Bolf used adhesive plastic foil, painting over it with glue and colored shellacs, which he would subsequently light on fire and leave to pour freely around the surface. In their psychedelic character, peculiar color palettes, and resemblance of organic shapes, these works differed from most contemporary abstract art and evidenced Bolf’s effort to liberate himself from conventional understandings of painting, which he newly sought to approach as a space for expressing his emotional state. Such works were influenced by the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium. During this time, Bolf developed an interest in various subcultures and in comic book aesthetics, which had not yet been incorporated into art within then Czech context.
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 National Gallery Prague (A Premonition of Shadow, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace). Bolf has also had solo exhibitions abroad, for instance in Slovakia (White and Weiss Gallery, Bratislava, 2022), France (Galerie Dukan, Paris, 2011, 2016), Hungary (Trafo Gallery, Budapest, 2015), German (Galerie Dukan, Leipzig, 2014), China (Arcaute – Arte Contemporáneo, Beijing, 2012, 2013), Switzerland (Arthobler Gallery, Zurich, 2013), and the USA (Ana Cristea Gallery, New York City, 2010) Many of his works are held in institutional and private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad.
