artists

Josef Bolf

"The most common themes in my work include vulnerability, infantilism, destruction and the limitations of communication. I try to work as authentically as possible with what I want to communicate, with certain emotions and states of mind. I strive for personal communication. I employ means that pose the least resistance to me – mainly drawings or paintings (my work is often derived from comics or illustrations in children's books). Auto-destruction and death, as a theme usually put off and unresolved, .... I feel it's important to somehow work with these things."

Josef Bolf
monograph catalog, published by Divus 2009
text by Tomas Pospyszly [ .pdf 117kb ]

Undercurrent
exhibition catalog, Galerie Rudolfinum 2009
text by Petr Nedoma [ .pdf 117kb ]

Josef Bolf, courtesy ArtList Database of Contemporary Art, by the Center for Contemporary Arts, Prague
by Zuzana Stefkova

Josef Bolf's paintings have been settled with strange figures, being half and half animals and people, and bringing together cartoon compositions (frame, wording) with omnipresent sadness and vulnerability. These heroes integrate infantile appearance with nostalgia and an unexplainable urge for self-destruction. While looking at a little pink dog with the eyes as if it came out of girl's diary, and the barrel of a gun in its mouth, we inevitably feel a certain disequilibrium, reflecting not just the personal obsession of the artist, but being indicative, to a certain extent, of a typical feature of the present day. Bolf depicts a world in which melancholy and neurosis, walk hand in hand. His messages are always deeply personal, almost slightly abnormal, no matter if the question is painting, airbrush, drawing, or cartoon. He describes supernatural without being limited with the surrealist form. His recent series uses the technology everybody may remember from art-and-crafts lessons. He scrapes through a layer of ink that covers a base surface of colored wax underneath. This process attended with corresponding associations intensifies our anxiety. Being reminiscent of childhood, often idealized territory of projected dreams about easy-going life and safety, seems to be heretical in contrast with gloomy and depressive motifs. With Bolf's little animals, reminders of childhood storybook and cartoon figures, the question is not just favorite cartoons, but the virtues identified with childhood, especially innocence. Bolf's paintings introduce destruction, anxiety and death into the world of trust and safety.

A Little One in Danger: The Povocative Beauty of Vulnerability
an excerpt from the article published in A2 kuturni tydenik, 27/2006
by Tomas Pospiszyl

Bolf's most recent work was created using a technique that many of us know from art class: a wax crayon colored background painted over in ink onto which the picture is then scratched. With this technique, Bolf has very elegantly succeeded in circumventing the problematic relationship between painting and drawing. He has developed a mixed media that is as close to painting as it is to drawing. Bolf's literally lacerated paintings radiate with poignant beauty. The heroes, difficult to define, are in these paintings as familiar stuffed animal characters with festering eyes who, in their horror of the world, are unable to quit the confines of their rooms or who mindlessly wander through the housing estates and hypermarkets as if they missed their last hance to commit suicide and are left with no other option than to carry on under the burden of unbearable suffering, the cause of which we can only imagine. It would be a mistake however to project the artist alone into the figure of these cowering wounded animals. The paintings of Josef Bolf are not an exhibitionist type of art therapy, whose sincerity and despair are meant to evoke compassion. His paintings much more reflect the anguish of our contemporary culture, which is why it is so easy to identify with the scenes of depression. Chaos does not represent the condition of the artist here, but of society as a whole. In this new series of work, Bolf accurately observes details from the world around him: an absurd sidewalk graveyard, the front end of an approaching metro, the atmosphere of an empty supermarket or a desolate evening surfing the internet, not only act as universal symbols of big city disaffection, but very closely document contemporary life.

Josef Bolf was born in 1971 in Prague. He studied drawing and painting at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of J. Naceradský, V. Kokolia and V. Skrepl from 1990-1998, as well as at the Kongsthögskolan in Stockholm (1995) and Akademie der bildende Künst in Stuttgart (1996). During his studies, he was an active member of the artist group BJ (Bezhlavý jezdec/Headless Horseman), active between 1996-2004, with fellow Academy students Jan Šerých, Ján Mančuška and Tomáš Vaněk.

A prolific painter and draughtsman, Josef Bolf has exhibited extensively, has been nominated and is the recipient of numerous grants, stipends and awards over the years, and has work in the Czech National Gallery and Prague City Gallery collections, as well in regional museums and prominent public and private collections throughout the Czech Republic and abroad. He was voted 2010 Artist of the Year in the Czech Republic for his exhibitions Personal Disposition at hunt kastner and I Won't See You Anymore at a former funeral chapel in Volyne, and for the realization his designed mosaic for the facade of the historic Jurkovic Villa in Brno that was commissioned by the Moravian National Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include Prague Biennale 4 (2009), Rudolfinum Gallery in the exhibitions UnderCurrent (2009) and Decadence Now! (2010), Hudson Valley Center for Contemporay Art in New York (2010), a solo presentation of new work in the exhibition You Are Not You, You Are Me presented for the first time at the Frieze art fair in London in 2009, and later at his solo exhibition at Prague City Gallery in 2010.