His first exhibitions were held in obscure places like the Prague club of hobby gardeners or an air-raid shelter in Česká Třebová. “It was not possible to exhibit much, but we needed to show and see our works,” said Aleš Lamr, now a 66-year-old respected artist and a favourite of Václav Havel, recalling the beginning of the 1970s. Dressed in a jacket and a tie made by himself (which also allows him to recognise members of his fanclub) Lamr awaited the first guests at his exhibition’s opening night. Prague’s exhibition hall Mánes has been hosting his retrospective exhibition called Vsobě (Inoneself) since Wednesday.
“Aleš Lamr’s paintings always fill me with optimism,” said Jiří Kříž, the curator who met the artist in 1969. At that time, Kříž returned from a study trip in the US and to his great surprise discovered that the new grotesque style in painting that has been getting attention overseas was independently brought to life at home too in the works of Aleš Lamr (as well as, in the works of Jiří Sopko, Jiří Načeradský or Michael Rittstein). “I felt world-class with Lamr,” said the curator.
Inspiration from a tank training field
The painter had come to be recognised for his sharp, bright colourfulness from the late 1960s. “My job was poster design and posters need to be bold. That’s how I discovered colours,” said Lamr who originally started with figurative scenes (exhibited in the basement) but has been creating abstract art for the past thirty years. Abstract art, however, often originates in concrete and prosaic things.
The retrospect begins with the latest works. Colourful structures resemble big electric discharge, intertwined networks of veins or a mess of bent tangles of “wires”. These paintings were inspired by the real, thick wires that the artist got from concrete tank barriers. “I found this heap of iron in ditches around bunkers, it took me the whole day to get it out.” He then painted the wires and created a 3-D object out of them that you can see in the middle of Mánes. “And then those wires also snuck into my paintings,” said the artist throwing his arms in the direction of the large “wiry” canvases.
Former President Václav Havel fell in love with Lamr’s abstracted prints of reality and his colourful playfulness. When Havel became the editor-in-chief of Hospodářské noviny for one day last year in autumn, there were almost no photographs in the paper the next day. There was, however, a number of Lamr’s felt-tip pen drawings, one of which adorned the cover. “I drew them very quickly, there was no connection to the text at all. I had no idea what Havel would choose for the newspaper,” the artist said.
The frescoes at Prague Castle were whitewashed
Havel’s appreciation of Lamr resulted in a number of prestigious projects. He, for example, created frescoes in the president’s office at Prague Castle. “There was a whole collection of artists, works by Šimotová, Medek and Koblasa. This offered an amazing opportunity to see Czech art whenever a foreign visitor entered the room,” said the author. He added that he thinks the castle rooms at the moment are decorated in a similar fashion as they were under Czechoslovakia’s former communist president, Gustav Husák. The collection of the paintings was removed and Lamr’s frescoes were lost under a layer of new paint.
An artist, who has been often working together with architects ever since the 1970s and whose works become parts of the buildings (foyer of the Husa na provázku Theatre, café and bistro of the Czech TV, stations of the cross in Dolní Maršov), is used to his frescoes being destroyed. There is quite a number of pieces of art at the end of the catalogue printed to accompany the retrospective exhibition followed by “destroyed”.
Lamr’s exhibition mentions his formative works including his oldest self-portrait from the 1960s. It is the abstract paintings and the sculptures that are dominant, however. “A landscape artist can lean on the landscape or the fruit boil when painting a still life. It is different with the abstract: I only draw from the things that are inside me. I am religious and so that something inside me is God. That is why the exhibition is called Inoneself.”
