Bohumil Eliáš Jr. & Sr.
Bohumil Elias Jr. (*1980) currently explores various artistic mediums, including parallel lines of painting, flat glass work, melted glass sculptures, and sculptural expressions in stone or new artificial materials. His artistic practice is a continuation of the prolific legacy left by his father, Bohumil Eliáš the Elder (1937-2005), who was a prominent figure in the art scene, particularly in the field of studio glassmaking. His father's distinctive style involved a unique fusion of glass and vibrant painting.
Glass sculptures (source: wikipedia.org). Finding his own authentic view and artistic expression and coming to terms with the subconscious influence of his father's glass work was not an easy moment for Bohumil Eliáš Jr. After graduating from the Secondary School of Glass Arts in Kamenický Šenov he therefore chose to continue his studies in the studio of figurative sculpture Jan Hendrych at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His sculptural vision obviously influenced his further artistic work in its entirety. Bohumil Eliáš Jr. is a rather introverted artist who is absorbed in the poetics of the uncluttered realities of the contemporary world. His movement towards the formulation of a personal artistic opinion develops slowly, with many returns and attempts at a different expression in the use of different materials.
The author opts for a way out of expressive explosiveness, complicatedly intermingling spatial plans and narrative moments. The dramatic storylines of the "world theater" are replaced by a play with the composition of shapes, details and fragments of things without complicated meanings. He is often interested only in a torsional but distinctive sculptural detail of architecture or embossed structure. Subsequently, it expresses them in the form of monumentality. For his sculptures he accepted the expressive possibilities of enamel. The use of glass material softens the initial austerity of its work by the unique moments of soft colored modeling by penetrating light, multiplying in paths. Glass gives Elias sculpture a grace of stop, a mysterious mystery, and suggests that there may be another hidden world, often vulnerable to humanity, in the outer, very tight, non-figurative shapes. In another position, glass uses a minimalist concept of glued prism in conjunction with metal, or as a compact layered shape filled with a tiny internal structure.
Education
1979 - 1980: glass school, Kamenický Šenov
2001 - 2007: Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, sculpture studio of Prof. Jan Hendrych
Exhibitions within the Knupp gallery
2019 - "Enigma"