Lot 213

Josef Bolf (1971) A LONELY EVENING II

Josef Bolf, one of the leading figures of the contemporary Czech art scene, creates a space for making a shared sense of insecurity visible through his work; he presents the indistinct and still relevant space of childhood and adolescence associated with the generation born in the 1970s during the Czechoslovak normalization. Josef Bolf studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Jiří Načeradský, Vladimír Kokola and Vladimír Skrepl. From the late 1990s to the present, he has had a number of solo exhibitions, both in the Czech Republic and abroad. He is a member of the art group called Bezhlaví Jezdci. In the case of the offered painting Lonely Evening II, it is a distinctive figurative work from the artist's prized period, almost inaccessible to collectors, in which the human figure is set in the symptomatic environment of a prefab residential estate. The evocation of contradictory moods in the midst of the housing estate is now one of the canonical examples of the common experience of a socialist unifying lifestyle. The central figure, himself undergoing an animal metamorphosis, is surrounded by technical anthropomorphizing objects. In the work, the urgent fantasy landscape - pulsing with colour reduced to whites with pink tones and black ink - is subtly transferred to the interior of an apartment: the intimate space of home.