Bio

Jenny Dolezel is a multi-award-winning contemporary painter, printmaker and drawer. She was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1964 of New Zealand/Czechoslovakian ancestry. Her mother, Margo Dolezel, was a talented painter and drawer, who encouraged Dolezel's passion for art from an early age and continued to do so all her life. They are both related to Sir David Low, the New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist.

Jenny Dolezel
Photo credit: Margo Dolezel

Drawing has always been the foundation of Dolezel's art practice. She began drawing as soon as she could hold a crayon - about 2 years old. As a small child she remembers drawing in her mother's kitchen-studio while her mother painted at her easel, and where she learnt so much about art, such as colour theory and the great masters, to wonderful bed-time stories where her mother read to her or made up stories - transporting them both into another world. It was with these early experiences that Dolezel learnt the power of the imagination, to escape from, and to decode the theatre of life.

Dolezel's oeuvres are allegories. They examine themes such as human folly and play, the fragility of life and resilience, and the complexity of relationships that are formed between beings.

Dolezel graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1987, and received her first Creative New Zealand grant (then called 'Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Grant') the same year. In 1988 TVNZ's arts programme 'Kaleidoscope' made a documentary on Dolezel and her art, directed by Roger Price.

Dolezel has won 24 major art awards - mainly in painting - the first being the Rosemary Grice Award in 1983. Her awards include winning First Prize in the Overseas League Overseas Award in London, UK, in 1996, where her oil on canvas 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' was given the highest of honours of all the Commonwealth countries' entries; also she was the Paramount Winner the same year in the Wallace Art Awards with her oil on canvas 'Charm School'; to winning the 1st Prize in 2006 in the Parklane Art Awards as well as being the Supreme Winner in the 2006 Team McMillan BMW Bonnet Art Awards.

Artist-in-residence programmes that Dolezel has participated in include the Rita Angus Residency in Wellington, NZ; the Fresno Art Museum Residency, CA, USA, and the Goethe Institute in Berlin, Germany - as a cultural scholarship.

Dolezel has lectured in painting and printmaking at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, and tutored at several art school programmes in the mid-90's and 2000's. She chose to not continue to lecture or tutor - although she loved both - due to so many artistic opportunities she wanted to pursue, and ongoing artistic projects.

Murals by Dolezel grace many city spaces, having received numerous public art commissions, such as 'The City Dreaming', SkyCity, Auckland; 'The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay', for The Boathouse, Sydney, Australia; and 'The Circus of Life', the Aotea Arts Centre, Auckland.

Dolezel exhibits widely throughout New Zealand, with solo exhibitions, also in the US and Europe. She has participated in many international Print Biennales, Triennales, and group exhibitions of her work in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the US and Europe.

Her work is represented in collections in most public art galleries and museums in New Zealand; and also in Australia and Europe, as well as in numerous private collections throughout the world.

Jenny Dolezel lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand and Berlin, Germany.

Examples of Artworks

Artist's Statement

Jenny Dolezel's work is an exploration of a psychological and physical territory that exists in the elusive realm between the known and the unknown, the real and the imagined.

From an early age Dolezel began experimenting with everything from performance art, video to installation - dealing with ideas of nihilism and the transience of life. But she eventually developed a style in part inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's paintings, and the black-humoured cartoons found in newspapers her Czechoslovakian grandmother would send from Prague. These inspired her to make prints and paintings that reflected some of their other-worldly visionary quality, combined with references of the familiar, and contemporary urban experiences.

"I want my life to be embedded in my work, crushed into my painting, like a pressed car. If it's not, my work is just some stuff. When I'm away from it, I'm crippled. Without my relationship to what may seem like these inanimate objects, I am just an indulgent misfit. If the spirit of being isn't present in the face of this work, it should be destroyed because it's meaningless. I am not making some things, I am making a synonym for the truth with all it's falsehoods.." wrote Julian Schnabel in his Madrid notebooks, and sentiments very much realised by Dolezel.

Dolezel's work is a conversation about ways of seeing – the realm of perception. In her work, the carnival became motif and the stage acted as a metaphor for life - vehicles that developed the work into an exploration of illusion/reality within the human condition. Dolezel's figures/creatures take the role of conductors between what we show on the outside and what we feel within. Within their theatrical set-up, the figures perform to the audience, inviting in and taunting the viewer as well as providing a reflection on aspects of themselves. As in all ‘theatrical productions’, the truth and tension of the work usually lies in it's subtext, and the characters act as staged conduits to bring this dialogue into viewing. The spatial in-betweenness of the characters is very important in creating the tensions within the work - taking the narratives into the realm of the psychological parody of reality.

Much of Dolezel's works are informed both conceptually and technically, by her experience of working in mezzotint, an intaglio printmaking process where the image is pulled (burnished) out of the darkness (of the rich velvety rocked up ground before being printed), and therefore deals directly with the theatre of revealing and concealing.

The stories she tells are universal stories, not limited to one place at all, with the motifs she uses based on the co-presence of memory and fiction, fantasy and dream. She sees her finished paintings as stills from a film.

It's important to Dolezel that her works are not read too literally. She believes the meanings that arise from the images are similar to meanings of images in dreams. There are limitless interpretations and stories about a dream with no one interpretation being the true one. Her work gives opportunity to navigate the meaning and sense of our perceived realities and their multitude of possibilities.