Bolf Josef

Josef Bolf was born in 1971 in Prague. He has been active on the art scene since the late 1990s, when his approach to figurative drawing began to mature. His inspiration from reading comics and science fiction literature was evident early on. The typical protagonists of his paintings are children or adolescents. Sometimes half-animal, these figures are lonely and often suffering in a disrupted urban environment. He often draws on his experiences from a childhood spent on the Jižní město housing estate in Prague, which he projects into surreal-fantasy scenes or apocalyptic, destroyed landscapes with a gloomy atmosphere. His typical process involves scratching a motif in ink over a wax base. Bolf exhibited his first paintings where he used this technique at the Soft and Pink exhibition in 2006. For the first time, he also set his figures in a housing estate as the setting for unspecified disasters. Teenagers, wounded in every way, walked frantically among the burning houses, clutched the decapitated heads of people and animals in their arms, bled, hid fearfully under tables, or just watched patiently over the ubiquitous work of destruction.