acrylic, ink, canvas, 85 × 150 cm, signed on the reverse of the canvas
Josef Bolf 2007
Urban scenery of prefabricated housing estates, unified blocks, streets and impersonal school interiors with apocalyptic atmosphere and bleeding or wounded beings, half childlike, half-animal, became the focus of Bolf's painting.
have become a hallmark for his art. For him, childhood is not an idyllic carefree period; it is marked by traumatic events, adversity, childhood mischief, cruelty, loneliness, and and all sorts of hardships, experienced often unnoticed the environment. In the paintings, therefore, the city, emptied and bleak, becomes a dangerous place to which its fragile heroes at their mercy. There is no one to help, nowhere to go to hide. Bolf, in his haunting paintings, in which he intimately
of lived events come to the surface, he shows the sensitivity and vulnerability of childhood and adolescence, which is often hidden behind the seemingly normal and indifferent everyday. The spectrality of the paintings is is supported by the specific colour palette, which is dominated by a sharp pink and black. Bolf also typically combines line drawing in these paintings with a relaxed painterly gesture, with splashes and runs of colour patches.
Josef Bolf (b. 1972) studied in 1990-1998 at the studios of Jiří Načeradský, Vladimír Kokolii and Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During his studies he became a member of the group Headless Horseman, which he founded with his classmate Tomáš Vaňek, Jan Šerých and Ján Mančuška. Rather than a joint artistic they were united by a generational affinity. The group ended its activity in 2002. In 2005, Bolf became a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Since the 1990s, the group has exhibited regularly and is one of the most sought-after artists of his generation.
