Background
Michael Bolus was born in 1934 in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa.
Saint Martin's School of Art
Michael Bolus was born in 1934 in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa.
Michael Bolus studied at Saint Martin's School of Art from 1958 to 1962, under the tutelage of Anthony Caro.
After a brief period living in Cape Town, Michael Bolus returned to London in 1964 to begin a teaching post at Saint Martin's and the Central School of Art and Design. For the New Generation show in 1965, he exhibited a series of polychromatic sculptures taking the form of abstract shapes cut out of sheet aluminum, placed flat on the ground or stood on edge. A vivid example of that group of works is "Bowbend", created in 1964. Bolus had his first United Kingdom solo exhibition at Waddington Galleries in 1968.
As a student, his earliest work was modeled or sculpted in stone, but Bolus soon abandoned these traditional techniques in favor of working with steel and aluminum, materials that allowed him to explore the notions of balance and the extension of form which had long interested him. For the New Generation show in 1965, Michael exhibited a series of polychromatic sculptures taking the form of abstract shapes cut out of sheet aluminum and placed flat on the ground.
A slightly earlier example of this group of works is the triangular piece, "9th Sculpture", created in 1963. However, in the 1970s his sculpture left the ground, becoming more fragmented and making use of lattice and grid-like constructions that defy gravity, such as "Untitled Sculpture No. 3", created in 1974, and "Untitled", created in 1981.
Michael Bolus died in 2013 in London, United Kingdom. He is currently represented in public collections around the world, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal; the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia; and Tate in London.
Bolus has spoken of his desire for his sculptures to ‘make themselves’; to invoke in the viewer the feeling that they are objects that they have stumbled across. With their radical simplification of form, Bolus’s works provoke a quiet play of oppositions between straight and curved lines, and presence and absence, as gaps create voids within the solids of the structure.
Mike Bolus was a really private artist and always uneasy about publicity. He was a man who did things slowly – when he rolled a cigarette Michael took his time, considering every move, looking and adjusting, every fag was a little masterpiece. He had quiet, thoughtful and withdrawn temperament.
