Josef Hampl

Josef Hampl (17 April 1932 – 25 March 2019) was a Czech collage artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and creator of land art projects. He is one of the founders of Czech abstract art. As a world-famous author of the original technique of sewn collages, he is represented in many foreign collections.

Early life and education
Hampl was born in Prague on 17 April 1932, into a family of a tailor and an amateur painter. After finishing school, he began apprenticing in his father's workshop, but the communist regime abolished virtually all trades during the 1950s. Josef Hampl was given the choice between working in mines, steelworks or in the engineering industry. Eventually he found a job as a metalworker at the Praga factory in Vysočany. Here, after his work shift, he used an art studio where employees could paint or model under the guidance of external teachers.

At an exhibition at the factory trade union club in 1959, he met Vladimír Boudník, who was employed at the neighbouring Aero factory. In addition to Vladimír Boudník, Lubomír Přibyl also worked in the same factory and after being expelled from the Academy in 1959, he found employment there in the promotional department. Boudník introduced Hampl to his graphic techniques and got him acquainted with Bohumil Hrabal and Jiří Kolář. The Vysočany Circle, which Oldřich Hamera joined in the mid-1960s, is a unique phenomenon in the history of modern Czech art. The inspiring thought environment of the strong personalities of Boudník, Hrabal and Kolář, as well as the everyday raw reality of factory work, marked a turning point in the aesthetic understanding and technical processing of artistic artefacts.

In 1955–1960 Josef Hampl studied at the private School of Decorative Arts in Prague under Prof. Jaroslav Masák and with sculptor Ivan Lošák from the Prague Ukrainian Academy. He also attended evening lectures on art history at the Václav Hollar Art School (prof. J. Wage) and participated in plein-air painting in South Bohemia with other students. Books on modern art were lent to him by Jiří Kolář, who was also his first critic and collector. He could not consider studying properly at art school in the 1950s because he came from a family of tradesmen. After leaving the army he was also prevented from studying by concern for his family.

Hampl died on 25 March 2019.

As an independent artist
Josef Hampl has been exhibiting independently since 1964. During the temporary relaxation of the regime in the second half of the 1960s, he was offered a job as an assistant in the graphic workshop of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, which served the studios of Prof. Vojtěch Tittelbach, Ladislav Čepelák and Jiří John. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia he survived here the entire period of normalization. While in Czechoslovakia he exhibited only in small unofficial galleries, throughout the 1970s and 1980s he was invited to graphic art shows around the world and became well known in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Hungary, France, Poland, Japan and the United States. Since the late 1960s, he has also worked inconsistently as a sculptor and has carried out 30 events and installations in outdoor and indoor settings. Since the 1970s he has participated in Mail art projects worldwide.

By 2017 he had 84 solo exhibitions in the Czech Republic and participated in 600 group exhibitions, 380 of which were abroad. After 2000 he worked in his studio in the countryside for most of the year and then settled there in 2009. He was a member of the art department of the Umělecká beseda, the free association Papirial and the Künstlergilde in Germany.

Awards

 * 23rd Vladimír Boudník Award for significant creative contribution to Czech graphic art (2017)

Work
In the 1950s, Josef Hampl learned realistic painting and tried various printmaking techniques (drypoint, linocut, woodcut). His acquaintance with Vladimír Boudník influenced his further work. In 1959–1962, he worked with structural and active graphics and made blind prints from relief matrices (Active print, 1959). In his abstract structural paintings he used, for example, found scratches of industrial synthetic paints or sand with synthetic binder as relief elements (Slow Catastrophe, 1963, Blue Unrest, 1965). His work from the first half of the 1960s is characterized by a creative search and exploration of other artistic means in an attempt to counter and overcome the strong impulse of Boudník's graphic work.

In 1964–1965, circular motifs as symbols of the planets predominate in his graphic sheets, created using a variety of techniques. The paintings have dark colours and usually combine structural graphics with relief painting or assemblage (Space of Silence, 1965). He also created a series of prints using frottage calligraphic script from old Jewish tombstones (Kafka, monofrottage, 1969). The need for a fixed order gradually prevailed in his works, and in a series of so-called counter-types from the late 1960s, he combined abstract monotypes with regular grids created using stencils.

Representation in collections
(Listed in: Josef Hampl, Šité kresby a koláže / Sewn drawings and collages, Gallery, Prague 2007, p. 9)
 * National Gallery in Prague
 * Centre Pompidou, Paris
 * Art Gallery Karlovy Vary
 * Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
 * Moravian Gallery in Brno
 * Graphiksammlung des XX. Jh., Deutscher Bundestag, Bonn
 * Museum für aktuelle Kunst, Utrecht
 * de Warande Culture Centre, Turnhout, Belgium
 * Stedelijk Museum, Toroke
 * Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
 * Museum Stucki, Lodz
 * Pratt Graphics Centre, New York
 * University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
 * Museum and Gallery, Hranice
 * Kassák múzeum és archívum, Budapest
 * State Jewish Museum, Prague
 * Ostfonds für kulturelle Angelegenheiten des Bundesministeriums für Unterricht und Kunst, Wienna
 * Collection of the Prague Gas Works
 * Collection of the Prague Gas Works
 * Collection of the Prague Gas Works

Catalogues (selection)

 * Josef Hampl: Graphics from 1959 to 1961, Tamchyna Petr, cat. 20 p., Závod Klementa Gottwalda, Vysočany, 1961
 * Josef Hampl, text by Hartmann Antonín, cat. 44 p., Galerie Bode Glaub, Cologne, 1970
 * Josef Hampl: Works with paper and drawing 1983–85, Pánková Marcela, cat. 2 p., Galerie Opatov 1986
 * Josef Hampl: Drawings - Sewing 1982–1986, Pánková Marcela, cat. 24 p., Central Cultural House of Railway Workers, Prague, 1986
 * Josef Hampl, text by Machalický Jiří, cat. 82 p., Gallery of Fine Arts in Most 1991
 * Josef Hampl: Balance 1982–1992, Machalický Jiří, cat. 48 p., ČFVU Praha, 1993
 * Josef Hampl: Sewn Collages, Hirsch Thomas et al., cat. 28 p., Gema Art Group, spol. s.r.o., Prague, 1996
 * Confrontation V.: Josef Hampl, Fiedor Jiří, cat. 12 p., Polish Institute in Prague, 2006
 * Josef Hampl, Machalický Jiří, cat. 16 p., Gallery, spol. s r.o. (Jaroslav Kořán), Prague, 2007
 * Josef Hampl: Sewn Drawings, Adriana Primusová, cat. 4 p., GASK Kutná Hora, 2017
 * Josef Hampl: Selected Works 1959–2016, text by Martina Vítková, cat. 110 p., Museum Kampa, Prague, 2017

Publications

 * Hynek Glos, Petr Vizina, Stará garda (The Old Guard), published by. Argo, Prague 2016, pp. 66–71, ISBN 978-80-257-1881-0
 * Jindřich Štreit (ed.), Sovinec 1986/88, OKS Bruntál 1989
 * Jiří Machalický, Vladislav Merhaut, Vladimír Boudník's Vysočany Circle, National Gallery in Prague 1992, ISBN 80-7035-043-1