Jan Hendrych (born 28 November 1936) is a Czech sculptor, painter, restorer, curator and professor emeritus at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

He studied at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague (1955–1961) in the sculpture studios of Prof. Josef Wagner and Prof. Jan Kavan and attended seminars in general aesthetics led by Dr. Dušan Šindelář.

[1] Jan Hendrych devoted himself to portraiture during his studies in Wagner's studio, but was also influenced by the expressiveness and emotional involvement of the Czech Baroque.

[4] Through Prof. Kaplický, he became acquainted with the work of Marino Marini[5] and learned from the expressive cubist modelling of Otto Gutfreund (Sitting in a Café, 1957)[4] the plastic construction of Henry Moore's sculptures, and the possibility of smooth transitions between figuration and abstraction.

[4] In the late 1960s he returned to figuration with his distinctive response to the impulses of American Pop art and French New Realism with the sculptures The Reader and Sitting with Beer (1968).

His reflection on the programme of New Sensibility and rational constructivism is one of the best examples of the liberating actuality of technical motifs in Czech art at that time.

The bridges are an existential metaphor for a fateful journey, a risk, a turning point, or a record of a dramatic event in conjunction with a human story.

[7] From the same period comes the series of sculptures Wardrobe (1996–1999), which are conceived as existential situations and seem to still partly preserve the volume of the disappeared bodies that clothed them.

[4] Hendrych is concerned with addressing the overall proportions and posture of the figure and consciously refrains from modelling parts he does not consider important - mostly the hands and face.

When depicting a literary subject, Hendrych returns to abstraction and concentrates on relief modelling of the surface (Kafka's Stories I-IV, 1998).

Colour polychromy is used for non-figurative subjects (House in the Garden, 2003–2004) or to increase the expressive effect (Bridge of the Jester, 1975, Lady Goose, 2005).

Jan Hendrych created an extensive set of preparatory drawings and graphic sheets (drypoint, etching) as studies for sculptures.