Róna Jaroslav *1957

Birds, 1988

pastel, paper, 70 × 80 cm, mount, frame, glass, signed. Bottom right IV. RÓNA 88 Exhibited: Tvrdohlaví Group, People's House, Prague 1989.
The drawing Birds from 1988 was created by Jaroslav Róna a few years after after graduating from university and shortly after the founding of the Prague artistic group Hardheads, which he founded together with Jiří David, Stanislav Diviš and other artists he co-founded. Tvrdohlaví se at the time of the ending of normalization and the transformation of Czech society, the against the introspective and existentially oriented work of the previous artistic generation and joined the international movement of new wild and postmodernism. From the beginning of his career, Jaroslav Róna moved in parallel in the painting and sculptural media, in which he soon developed a distinctive artistic language based on a combination of solid figurative form with mythical and archaic symbols. Scenes with human figures, lions, birds, snakes and imaginary human-animal creatures often set in oppressive inhospitable, apocalyptic locations, allude to the fantasy world genre, depicting the dark and twisted sides of life and human civilization. Jaroslav Róna (b. 1957), painter, sculptor, teacher, graduated from glass studio of Stanislav Libensky from 1978 to 1984 at the School of Applied Arts in Prague. In 1987-1992 he was a member of the Hardheads group. Since 2006 he has been the head of the studio of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Since the beginning 1990s, he has produced a number of sculptural works in public space, such as the Franz Kafka Monument in Prague (2003) or the Equestrian Sculpture Margrave Jost in Brno (2015).