Ana Cristea Gallery is proud to present the first US solo exhibition of Czech painter Josef Bolf.

Bolf’s highly-charged, beautifully-rendered, and idiosyncratic paintings place him in the vanguard of a new generation of artists from Eastern and Central Europe. The work of these artists reflects a duality: it is highly conversant with the best work from the West yet also unapologetically reflective of their own roots. Like several of this generation’s best painters—Adrian Ghenie (Romania), Zsolt Bodoni (Hungary), Daniel Pitin (Czech Republic), Alexander Tinei (Hungary)—Bolf proffers dark and sometimes cryptic narratives.

The paintings featured in this show wrestle with Bolf’s own memories of growing up in communist Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s. The places depicted are actual sites, chosen for their architectural interest but also for their symbolic stature within what Bolf has referred to as his “private mythology.” These sites are populated by children—Bolf himself and others close to him—whose worlds are shattered and desolate. They are confronted with fearful events but there are no adults to save them. Talking about the fear that permeated his childhood, Bolf has said:

By this time most adults knew that an atomic conflict was not a realistic outcome of the cold war, but at school we would regularly practice hiding out in the woods, dressed in raincoats and with plastic bags on our hands and feet, preparing ourselves for a situation where we would become separated from our families and where the world as we knew it would become extinct.

Bolf’s paintings are undeniably dark and even disturbing, but they are not made to horrify. They are made to tell a (personal) truth.

Josef Bolf was born in 1971 in Prague, the city where he still lives and works. He studied at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts as well as in Sweden and Germany. In 2009, along with Damien Hirst and Jonathan Messe, he was in a four-person museum exhibit at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. In 2010 he will have a one-person show at Hunt Kastner Gallery in Prague and in September 2010 he will be included in AFTER THE FALL, an exhibit of leading young artists from Eastern and Central Europe organized by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY.