Olaf Hanel was a multifaceted artistic personality and an important dissident. In addition to his creative work he was also a curator, art historian, qualified teacher and illustrator. He was a signatory of Charter 77 and a member of the Křižovnické školy čistého humoru bez vtipu (Crusader School of Pure Humour without Jokes). This was founded in 1963 in the Prague pub U Křížovníků, where the founding artists – Karel Nepraš and Jan Steklík – used to meet. The activities of the joke free art association were based on the poetics of Kafkaesque absurdity and often related to the pub environment. An example is the performance Beer in Art, in which samples were taken from various restaurants and the best examples subsequently sealed in resin after beer protocols had been drawn up. Since 1970, the School’s home venue has been the pub U zlatého soudku, and the group has grown to include a number of other members from artistic backgrounds. The “Crusaders” are classified as a neo-avant-garde group of the 1960s, whose aim was unbridled merriment in times of heavy-handed regime repression. This was manifested in the absurdity, the inappropriateness and the banality of the events organised, which could thus be a bastion of resistance and relative artistic freedom.
Hanel was among the main representatives of action art of the 1960s and 1970s with his mainly land-art events, which he organised in collaboration with other Crusaders. Apart from Czechoslovakia, he also worked in exile, living for the longest time in Canada. As the son of a Sudeten German, born two years before the end of the Second World War, he was confronted from the beginning of his life with the dramatic events of the twentieth century. He referred to them repeatedly in his work, both through the rebellious character of some of his work and through a poetics that celebrates the infinity of nature and a universe beyond all human endeavour.
Hanel’s father committed suicide at the end of April 1945. The reason was his important position in the Kolben-Daněk factory, which was part of the German war industry. After this event, his mother moved the family to Světlá nad Sázavou, where Hanel attended an art school run by the academic painter František Antonín Jelínek. He then graduated from university in Pardubice, where he studied at the Pedagogical Institute, which is now part of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hradec Králové (1960–1962). It was at this time that he began to publish his first drawings in the periodicals Tvorba, Plamen and Host do domu.
From 1971, Hanel lived in Prague, where he became an important member of the underground scene. His collaboration with the Crusader School of Pure Humour without Jokes gained in intensity during this time. However, he continued to return to the area around Světlá in the highlands, where he held several land-art events that resembled ceremonial rituals and often referred to astronomical phenomena, as in the case of one of his most famous performances entitled Pocta jasným hvězdám / Homage to the Bright Stars (1972), in which he spread one hundred and twenty metal containers over an area of approximately one hectare, in which he and his friends lit fires to celebrate the first day of spring.
Within the framework of the Crusader School, he undertook so-called patriotic trips. One such performance derived from a trip to Blaník and is entitled Buzení blanických rytířů / The Awakening of the Knights of Blanik (1975). It is based on a legend that claims that the sleeping defenders will rise from the mountain when the country is in crisis. Another performance took place at the source of the River Vltava, where a musical group called Sen noci svatojánské (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) performed part of a composition by Bedřich Smetana.
Hanel is also the designer of the album covers of the legendary art rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, and their collaboration was mutual. He regularly worked with them on the visual design of the records, while members of band took part in several of his events. Their activities often overlapped, as was the case with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was formed under the aegis of the Crusader School and consisted of Karel Nepraš, Míla Hájek, Milan Čech, Petr Lamp, as well as Vratislav Brabec, who was also a member of The Plastic People.
After Hanel signed Charter 77, the regime’s interest in him intensified, and he was forced to work as a boilerman in a children’s hospital in Krč. The pressure placed on him by the regime became so intense that the artist applied for asylum in Austria, where he travelled in February 1979. Like many other dissidents, however, he continued on, further west, to Canada, where he lived and worked intensively for almost twelve more years in Sherbrooke, Montreal and Toronto. Even there, however, he remained in contact with the Czech dissident scene as much as possible and supported it as best he could. For example, in 1989, he stood in front of the Czech embassy in Canada in 1989 with a protest banner on which were written the words Liberez [French for “free”] and the names Jirous, Stárek, Hýbek, Fryč, in order to draw attention to the imprisoned representatives of the cultural scene.
Thanks to scholarships and grants, he also got to Scotland. Here, in the village of Lumsden, his first wire objects were built (1983), some of them up to five metres high. In these installations, using everyday materials such as wire, stones and Plexiglas, Hanel explored the possibilities of defining space and emptiness. In addition to Canada, his works have also been exhibited in the US and Argentina. During his stay in France (between 1986 and 1987), he again worked with manhole-cover prints. He was fond of using everyday objects such as buckets, thimbles and mousetraps, in addition to wire, as building materials for his sculptures. He did not use only canvas as a base for his paintings (mostly acrylic), but also, for example, a tablecloth. Among the frequent motifs of Hanel’s work were themes from astrology: stars or black holes, related geometric shapes such as circles, ellipses and arches, as well as other objects, clusters and groupings in different colour spectra of related shades.
Hanel continued his artistic work after his return to Czechoslovakia, where he moved after the revolution in 1991. Soon after, he became curator of the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague, where he worked for almost twenty years. Thanks to his theoretical work, a number of publications, exhibition catalogues and thematic treatises were published. For example, for the centenary of the Osma group in 2007 he published a catalogue entitled Osma po 100 letech / The Eight a 100 Years On. The exhibition of the same name commemorated, among other things, the important tradition of the artistic groups in whose history Hanel had also been involved through his membership in the Crusader School. As far back as 1997, he released an important publication entitled The Art of Stopped Time, which mapped the development of Czech visual art between 1969 and 1985. In his texts, however, he also dealt with solo presentations by artists such as Jan Mladovský and Jaroslav Panuška.
Hanel made his home in Lysá nad Labem, where he died on 1 December 2022 at the age of seventy-nine.
