Aleš Lamr
June in Potštejn
Artist
Aleš Lamr
(1943, Olomouc - 2024, Praha), Czech
Original Title
June in Potštejn
Date1973
Mediummixed media on canvas
Dimensions145 × 110 cm
Classificationspaintings
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
DescriptionAleš Lamr is a Czech painter, but he also works as a graphic designer, sculptor and ceramist and he has carried out a number of works in architecture. His works are notable due to their colourist approach and their spaced, organic drawing-style which gives them a unique whimsicality.
The motif from the beginning of the 1970s represents Lamr’s style of those years, which showed smooth contour drawings and exalted colour schemes indicative of his mannerist dispositions. The drawing is sprawling and spatial, and Lamr’s deft use of scenery creates a stage which provides the author with space for the motif’s spontaneous development. The theme of a rural spring with hints at painted Easter eggs and apples presents Lamr’s personal synthesis of Czech humor and American pop art and can be read as his own personal way of easing the pressures of Normalisation.
Aleš Lamr (*1943, Olomouc) graduated in 1964 from the Secondary School of Applied Arts, the Department of Spatial Design in Brno, under prof. J. A. Šálek. He gained experience in the field of scenography and has acquired art techniques from painting and graphics to working with wood, glass, metal, plastic and paper. During the peak of the New Wave of Czech cinematography (1966–68) he worked as an assistant director of ČS state film at Barrandov. His work during the 1960s is a tribute to a mysterious universal myth, which transcends the whole of our world and mankind. Although Lamr entered the art scene during a time when the main interest was abstraction, he retained the figure as his main point of interest. At the end of the 1960s, Aleš Lamr was influenced and started working with the colourfulness of pop-art and his work originally developed the style of narrative figuration (the exhibition of Gérard Gassiot-Talabot in the Galerie Václava Špály, 1966), although he was also influenced by the legacy of local Mannerism. He developed a world of fantastical metaphorical narration which drew on the simple realities of contemporary life. Since the 1970s, Lamr’s style has been characterised by contoured drawing of objects and figures; his images are full of colourful but harmonically softened tones of acrylic paints which make for a dynamic and shapely mosaic. The difference between the shape of a particular object derived from reality and a wholly abstract sign, or an object’s silhouette and internal structure easily meld with the surrounding space and colour blots. His paintings from this period can be considered examples of the “Czech grotesque” and New Figuration, but there are also obvious parallels with American Pop-Art, with its graphism and reporting objectivity. Especially the grotesque style of Lamr’s New Figuration shows his spontaneous play of shapes, his tendency towards building narrative and an appreciation for free, white space derived their energy from the optimistic late 1960s, which helped ease the oppressive atmosphere of the occupation and the Normalisation era. In the 1980s, during a time when the society’s overall fatigue of Normalisation was culminating, Lamr’s paintings adopt dark colours interspersed with motifs of rainbow, stars, spirals or crosses, as colour symbols having to do more with the sky than with the earth. The paintings are permeated with spirituality and a deep personal faith, and this respect also shows a greater taste for abstraction and the navigation of universal and timeless symbolic shapes. After 1989, Lamr’s expression shifted toward a larger format, and showed more generality and a lack of psychologising towards a lightness of expression and free imagination, symbolising the dynamics of the modern world, as well as a liberated and vital joy of life. He is a member of the visual arts department of Umělecká beseda and in 1991–2013 he was a member of the Hollar Association of Czech Graphic Artists. He lives and works in Prague and Petrovičky. In 1985, he gained third place at the Premió Jean Miró competition in Barcelona.
The motif from the beginning of the 1970s represents Lamr’s style of those years, which showed smooth contour drawings and exalted colour schemes indicative of his mannerist dispositions. The drawing is sprawling and spatial, and Lamr’s deft use of scenery creates a stage which provides the author with space for the motif’s spontaneous development. The theme of a rural spring with hints at painted Easter eggs and apples presents Lamr’s personal synthesis of Czech humor and American pop art and can be read as his own personal way of easing the pressures of Normalisation.
Aleš Lamr (*1943, Olomouc) graduated in 1964 from the Secondary School of Applied Arts, the Department of Spatial Design in Brno, under prof. J. A. Šálek. He gained experience in the field of scenography and has acquired art techniques from painting and graphics to working with wood, glass, metal, plastic and paper. During the peak of the New Wave of Czech cinematography (1966–68) he worked as an assistant director of ČS state film at Barrandov. His work during the 1960s is a tribute to a mysterious universal myth, which transcends the whole of our world and mankind. Although Lamr entered the art scene during a time when the main interest was abstraction, he retained the figure as his main point of interest. At the end of the 1960s, Aleš Lamr was influenced and started working with the colourfulness of pop-art and his work originally developed the style of narrative figuration (the exhibition of Gérard Gassiot-Talabot in the Galerie Václava Špály, 1966), although he was also influenced by the legacy of local Mannerism. He developed a world of fantastical metaphorical narration which drew on the simple realities of contemporary life. Since the 1970s, Lamr’s style has been characterised by contoured drawing of objects and figures; his images are full of colourful but harmonically softened tones of acrylic paints which make for a dynamic and shapely mosaic. The difference between the shape of a particular object derived from reality and a wholly abstract sign, or an object’s silhouette and internal structure easily meld with the surrounding space and colour blots. His paintings from this period can be considered examples of the “Czech grotesque” and New Figuration, but there are also obvious parallels with American Pop-Art, with its graphism and reporting objectivity. Especially the grotesque style of Lamr’s New Figuration shows his spontaneous play of shapes, his tendency towards building narrative and an appreciation for free, white space derived their energy from the optimistic late 1960s, which helped ease the oppressive atmosphere of the occupation and the Normalisation era. In the 1980s, during a time when the society’s overall fatigue of Normalisation was culminating, Lamr’s paintings adopt dark colours interspersed with motifs of rainbow, stars, spirals or crosses, as colour symbols having to do more with the sky than with the earth. The paintings are permeated with spirituality and a deep personal faith, and this respect also shows a greater taste for abstraction and the navigation of universal and timeless symbolic shapes. After 1989, Lamr’s expression shifted toward a larger format, and showed more generality and a lack of psychologising towards a lightness of expression and free imagination, symbolising the dynamics of the modern world, as well as a liberated and vital joy of life. He is a member of the visual arts department of Umělecká beseda and in 1991–2013 he was a member of the Hollar Association of Czech Graphic Artists. He lives and works in Prague and Petrovičky. In 1985, he gained third place at the Premió Jean Miró competition in Barcelona.
