Oldřich Hamera

Vladimír Boudník and Bohumil Hrabal, whom Hamera remembered years later on the occasion of their anniversaries, appear in his most recent collages from 2014. Hamera depicts each of them in their own world, Hrabal as a pundit telling incredible stories, Boudník as a creator of original graphic sheets.

After 2000, he returned to the technique of active printmaking with works from the series " Roosters", where he used irregularly shaped matrices (Kicked Rooster, 2002). He also revisited structural monotypes. In 2010, an edition of Mácha's Máj illustrated with monotypes by Oldřich Hamera was published.

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. The colouring of Hamera's prints is muted and respects the hues of natural materials such as oxidized minerals, fossil imprints and soil dyes.

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.

Graphic art by Olřich Hamera through the eyes of Bohumil Hrabal (from the introduction to the 1975 exhibition): "In Hamera's monotypes, one can trace the wetness of caves inhabited by the Proteus anguinus, the struggles of microbes and moulds, the smell of the compressed fauna and flora of mining shafts, where dripping from the walls and tangled wires and cables glisten in the corner. But in almost every monotype of Hamera's there is a trilobite, that beautiful greeting from the primordial mountains, a print that resembles a human skeleton, a crushed miner's lamp, the lacing of a hussar's coat, the trilobite as Hamera's signature and jingle, which has arced into the Barrandov rocks and thence into Hamera and, through his hands, into printmaking." (Bohumil Hrabal: A Tribute to Barrande).

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.

In the 1970s, Hamera drew on his fresh experience as an illustrator of scientific publications, and in his monotypes he refers to bizarre living organisms (the Tapeworm and Cosmology series) and especially to visually appealing paleontological finds such as trilobites and ammonites.

Since the mid-1970s, he has also worked on the restoration of important monuments in the Czech Republic (the Old Town Hall in Prague, Lemberk Castle). At the end of the seventies he completed the graphic design of the House of Jan Hus in Konstanz, but was not allowed to visit the monument itself.

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.

Oldřich Hamera has participated in dozens of joint exhibitions since 1967, for a selection see abART.

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.

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.

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