Josefína Jonášová

Sculptor, painter and musician, born in 1986. She comes from Prague, spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Třeboň and lives and works permanently in Prague (she is also listed as Josefína Šimková Jonášová). She graduated from the Václav Hollar Higher Vocational School and Secondary School of Art and from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2013, Jaroslav Róna’s sculpture studio; her diploma work won the Rector’s Prize for the best graduation work), and also studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and at the École supérieure d’art in France. Sculpture is at the centre of her work, but she also paints and draws, both in the studio and in public space. She works with traditional sculptural techniques (modelling in clay, polystyrene for large objects) as well as with materials suited to outdoor settings — patinated ceramics, epoxy, acrystal.

Her poetics rests on hybridity and exaggeration, on the blending of approaches and the mixing of categories of existence; a dreamlike, light visual idiom serves as a screen onto which serious social and existential subjects are projected. She is a member of the artists’ and designers’ association Prám and plays the violin in the band Vobezdud.

She has taken part in almost twenty exhibitions in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and France (among them Moonology; Relative Safety, Hořice; her first exhibition of sculptures in Třeboň). Works in public space: the Ládví metro underpass in Prague (and the underpasses at Zahradní Město, Říčany and Prague-Vysočany), Kasárna Karlín, the Třeboň spa, the Radost building, and also Vodňany, Beroun and Taipei. Well-known works: Anticoncept (2012, named the most original sculpture of the season), Freu(n)d (2017), enthusiASIA (2017), Metamorphosis (2019), Our Lady of the Sea / Madonna and Child in Třeboň (2023). Awards: the Young Award for the best young artist under 35 at the Art Prague fair.