Oldřich Hamera

Oldřich Hamera (3 March 1944 – 15 November 2021) was a Czech printmaker, painter, illustrator, printer, typographer, publisher and restorer.

Life Hamera was born in Úvaly. He has been drawing living organisms and made prints of fossilized animals all his life and originally wanted to become a scientist. Because of his family background, he was not allowed to study and eventually trained as a machinist and machine repairman, but his interest in art and scientific fields such as paleontology, mineralogy, and medicine persisted.

After completing his basic military service, he worked at the state-owned company ČKD Trakce in Prague from 1964. Here he met Vladimír Merhaut, Josef Hampl and also Vladimír Boudník, who showed him graphic techniques and gave Hamera a printing press. In the same year he met Bohumil Hrabal and the company of unofficial and semi-official artists, art theoreticians and writers of the 1960s. Hrabal introduced Hamera to Jiří Kolář, and theoreticians Josef Zumer, Radko Pytlík, František Šmejkal and Antonín Hartmann.

Due to the protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, he was forced to leave ČKD and took a position as technical editor at the Czechoslovak Centre for Construction and Architecture on Wenceslas Square in Prague. Due to his political views, however, he soon had to leave the post and became an ordinary worker. In 1973, he trained as a printer of small offset presses at Central Bohemia Printers and began working at the Czechoslovak Centre for Construction and Architecture as a colour printer. For political reasons, however, he had to go into lower job grades, where he successively held positions as a copyist, photographer, bookbinder or yard worker. In the 1980s, he returned for a short time once more to the job of printer, but again had to move from it within the company to the department of catalogue sheets for construction as a technical editor and graphic designer. As a draughtsman he worked with the Department of Parasitology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, in the 1970s.

In the late 1970s, the house where Hamera lived and had his studio was demolished. At the same time, his marriage went through a crisis and ended in divorce. Hamera continued to paint and draw and revived Boudník's samizdat publishing house Explosionalismus, where, in addition to texts by Hrabal, Klíma and bibliophilias dedicated mainly to Vladimír Boudník, he published The Intimate Diary of Karel Hynek Mácha, for which he received the Jiří Kolář Prize for Literature in 1971.

After the fall of the communist regime in 1989 he moved to Liberec, where he began working as an independent artist for Skloexport and other companies. In the mid-1990s he returned to Prague again. He devoted himself to applied graphic art, book illustration and lecturing. He appeared in documentaries and popular science films and participated in radio broadcasts. In December 2012 he underwent a liver transplant. He then gradually returned to painting, drawing and printmaking.

Death Hamera died on 15 November 2021.

Work Prints and monotypes In the 1960s, when he acquired printing equipment from Vladimír Boudník, he first tried active and structural printmaking techniques after Boudník and tried his own distinctive contribution and various modifications of matrix preparation. Hamera soon began to break away from his teacher's influence in his monotypes with cycles on the themes of space, water worlds or the birth of matter. Later he developed his own original technique of layered monotype, where by gradually scanning the prints he reveals the different coloured layers previously applied to the matrix.

He returned to natural history themes in the 1990s, when he collaged his prints with images from scientific publications. Often these were auto-collages using his own older scientific illustrations of trilobites, graptolites, orthoceras or ammonites. He also revisited structural monotypes. In 2010, an edition of Mácha's Máj illustrated with monotypes by Oldřich Hamera was published.

Hamera's derealisations use as source material the palaeontological tables of the Silurian system of Joachim Barrande with overprinting of his own matrices of structural graphics (Derealisations of Barrandien). He achieved a similar effect by derealizing musical scores or geographical atlases.

Typographic work Oldřich Hamera participated as a typographer in the editing of catalogues and anthologies published by the Ztichlá klika publishing house and in the publications of the Prague Imagination publishing house dedicated to Vladimír Boudník.

Publisher (selection) K. H. Mácha (diaries of Karel Hynek Mácha with illustrations by Jiří Kolář), 40 p., samizdat, 1976 Boudník, Vladimír: Corpus delicti, 1974, samizdat Ladislav Klíma: Cholupický den, 1976, samizdat Pravoslav Kotík: Portrait of a Czech Artist, 1976, samizdat, compiled, introductory text by Bohumil Hrabal In Memory of Jaroslav Kladiva, with texts by Karel Marysky "For Ph. Dr. Jaroslav Kladiva" and Hrabal's literary collage "The Rite of Spring", 1987, samizdat Hrabal, Bohumil: A Love Letter, The Oracle, 1987, samizdat, with his own roulades Hrabal, Bohumil: The Swan of Avon, 1989, samizdat To Jiří Kolář on his 75th birthday, with texts by Jan Skácel, "Thanks", "Not a Day" by Karel Šiktanec, "Letter to a Friend" by Bohumil Hrabal and "Report on the Slavia Café" by Ludvík Vaculík, with his own monotype: Tribute to Jiří Kolář with John Bull motif and roulades by Jiří Kolář. Homage to Vladimír Boudník, 1989, samizdat Josef Jira :60, 1989, samizdat Hrabal, Bohumil: Grayhound story, 1989, samizdat Hrabal, Bohumil: Hrabal's Letter to Dubenc from November 1989, samizdat Michael Rittstein, drawings by Michael Rittstein, 1980s Klíma, Ladislav: Jsem absolutní vůle, date illegible, together with V. Zadrobílek Váchal, Josef: Vademecum, Prague 1978, together with V. Zadrobílek Participation in the preparation: Nezval, Vítězslav: Sexual Nocturne, samizdat, undated

Montages on books Josef Váchal - Enchanted Sumava. First edition of unpublished text. Printed by Mirek Bujárek, graphic design by V. Z., montage by Oldřich Hamera. Edition of 110 copies, published in 1985 Josef Váchal - Orbis pictus. Facsimile of Váchal's print (slightly reduced) from 1932. Cover by the publisher, edition of 120 copies. Mounting of lithographs by Oldřich Hamera. Before the publisher's afterword photo by Bohdan Holomíček. Published in 1985.

Design and realizations 1979 Exhibition: fine art and music, Theatre of Music, together with Vladimír Lébl, presented to the Mrs. Martinů Foundation 1989 Realization of the representative rooms of Pragomont, interior design and decoration, utility objects 1995 Decoration of the representative rooms of TV Nova 1997 Participation in the decoration of the Čs. Savings Bank 1998 Participation in the decoration of the bank, Národní třída, Perštýn 1998 Design and participation in the realization of a large-scale painting on the wall of the District Office for Prague 10, with students of the VŠUP 1999 Participation in the decoration of the First Prague Gasworks 2005 Decoration of the law office Havel, Kuchař, Ryšavá and partner s.r.o.

Exhibitions (selection) 1967 Institute of Microbiology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague 1970 Regional Gallery Liberec 1976 Collections, Veterinary Research Institute, Brno 1976 Memory of Matter, Theatre of Music, Prague 1979 Monotypes, Central Institute of Geology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague 1996 Duna Museum, Esztergom, Hungary 1999 Fossils from the collections of the North Bohemian Museum - Oldřich Hamera "Monotypes"; North Bohemian Museum, Liberec 2003 Monotypes, Town Hall, Frýdlant 2005 Mácha's May, Průmyslový palác, Prague 2006 Derealization of Barrandien, Akropolis Palace, Prague 2006 Monotypes by O. Hamer, Industrial Palace, Prague 2006 Oldřich Hamera. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Lucerna Palace, Prague 2013 Oldřich Hamera. On his seventieth birthday, Ztichlá klika Gallery, Prague 2014 Prints by Olřich Hamera through the eyes of Bohumil Hrabal, Czech Centre, Munich, Germany 2014 Barrandien through the eyes of Oldřich Hamera, Homeland Museum in Beroun 2014 Mácha's May in Oldřich Hamera's monotypes, K. H. Mácha, Litoměřice 2015 Wrinkling. Graphic art by Oldřich Hamera, Smečky Gallery, Prague 2015 Oldřich Hamera. Mácha's May in Monotypes, K. H. Mácha in Doksy Oldřich Hamera has participated in dozens of joint exhibitions since 1967, for a selection see abART.