This morning we traveled to the studios of two prominent Czech artists: Josef Bolf and Jana Vojnárová.
Josef Bolf is a Czech figurative painter and has been called one of the most important Czech artists of his generation. In the 1990s, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Since then, he has been represented by many galleries and his work has entered collections in the Czech Republic and around the world.
After an introduction by Valeria, Bolf began by talking about a new series of small paintings for his upcoming exhibition at DOX Art Gallery in Prague. He talked his subject matter, painting process, and studio practice, among other things.
Bolf then showed some of his earlier paintings and described the ways in which his personal context — such as his memories of growing up in the 1970s in Communist era pre-fabricated panelák housing estates — has influenced his paintings and continues to influence his work today.
In the words of Lenka Lindaurová at Artefin:
“In one word, Josef Bolf’s painting could probably be described as dark, but it is also characterized by a certain nostalgic or melancholic mood. On his canvases and graphics, we often meet children and teenagers set in the environment of urban housing estates or in some kind of apocalyptic, destroyed landscape in which they are surrounded by strange and dreamlike creatures. These motifs can also relate to the childhood of the artist himself, which he spent in the Jižní Město housing estate in Prague, where he and his family moved during its construction.”
Jana Vojnárová
After a couple of hours with Josef, we made our way to the studio of artist Jana Vojnárová.
Like Bolf, Jana Vojnárová is one of the most important Czech artists working today. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the early 2000s. She has been represented by many galleries and her work has entered collections in the Czech Republic and around the world.
After an introduction by Nathan, Vojnárová showed us the paintings that she is currently working on. She described some of the interests and motifs guiding her work, including representations of the female body and the memories and stories of family members. She also talked about some of the techniques and methods she uses in her work, like collage.
In the words of Viktor Čech at Artlist:
“The human figure has been a prominent motif in the art of Jana Vojnárová to date. Her expressive painting style and the consistent sense of a kind of blurriness and its distancing effect furnishes her paintings with a flat pictorial surface, behind which, like the view through a rainy window, lies an elaborate visual space. Although direct contact with the artist’s brushwork thus separates us from this figurative visual space, the barrier is two-dimensional and beyond it we can divine the full-blown pseudo-narrative of the bodies and creatures that inhabit these spaces. By playing with figurative relations in the composition in some paintings she arrives at a looser, almost abstract accentuated version of her painting style, which brings out the airy quality of her tricky technique.”
After these two dynamic studio visits, students broke for lunch and then met for language class at our cafe classroom.
Later in the evening, we came together again to watch “Daisies” (1966), directed by Věra Chytilová. To match the extravagance of this iconic Czech New Wave film, we splurged on candy.
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