Jaroslav Koléšek

Sculptor and teacher, born on 6 February 1974 in Šternberk. From 1988 to 1992 he studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Brno, and from 1992 to 1997 sculpture at the University of Ostrava (department of art / sculpture studio, under Professor Stanislav Hanzík and the academic sculptor Marius Kotrba). From 2009 to 2012 he completed doctoral studies at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica (ArtD.). From 1998 to 2010 he taught at the Secondary Technical School of Glassmaking in Valašské Meziříčí, and since 2008 he has worked in the sculpture department of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Ostrava, where he has been head of department since 2011 (Assoc. Prof. Mgr. Jaroslav Koléšek, ArtD.).

He is a member of the artists’ group VY3. He works with both classical and unconventional materials — bronze, sandstone, concrete and cement, and often glass as well. His sculptures combine an explicit respect for the sculptural tradition with a distance from its certainties; they are marked by irony, wit and exaggeration, shifts of scale and the repetition of formal motifs, and by a tension between technicist and organic morphology. Solo exhibitions include Strange News (Olomouc, 2017), Images of a New Iliad (Opava, 2018), Fragile Weapons (Kutná Hora, 2019), An Error in Circulation (Košice, 2020), From Model to Sculpture (Gallery of Fine Arts in Hodonín). Represented in the collections of galleries in Zlín, Olomouc and Valašské Meziříčí; the work Ayrton Senna (2006) is at Museum Kampa. Awards: the V. Chad Prize (2003), the Rudolf Schlattauer Prize (2010).

For the Art in the City festival he made, among other things, the sculpture Triton (České Budějovice, 2020). He lives and works in Valašské Meziříčí.