Petr Zlamal

Šternberk-based Petr Zlamal ranks among prominent expressive Czech painters of the older middle generation, who live and work out of Prague. An exceptionally talented son of outstanding painter Wilhelm Zlamal (1915-1995), Petr Zlamal exhibited for the first time at fourteen. His obvious talent subsequently developed during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague at the Department of Monumental Painting of Professor Arnošt Paderlík. After graduation in 1974 Zlamal returned to his native town of Šternberk and opted for the uneasy career of a free-lance artist. In addition to commissions of applied art and works in architecture, by which he made his living, he devoted himself to figure painting, close in its concept to the art of some members of Free Association 12/15. This Prague grouping came into being in the late 1980s as a response to the emergence of the young generation with post-modern orientation. However, Petr Zlamal differed from his classmates from the Prague Academy – and later members of this group (such as Václav Bláha and Michael Rittstein) – both by his topics and coloristic feeling. While his classmates mostly depicted a mentally stripped man crushed by the wheelwork of the totalitarian society, Zlamal in his paintings accentuated on one hand the relationship of man to technology and on the other hand basic human relations (for example, man – woman, mother – child, lovers, etc.) It is possible to say with some exaggeration that by the ideological focus of their work his collegues (as well as Vladimír Novák and Petr Pavlík) were closer to the legacy of the noted group Seven in October (founded in 1939), whose members included Arnošt Paderlík, while Zlamal tended more towards the imagery of Group 42, whose group program was also formed during the Second World War. The former classmates have differed to this day also in purely painterly terms. Zlamal´s typical brushwork apparently inclines to the German painting tradition, while his Prague collegues are oriented more to French painting. Petr Zlamal (like his father) thus brings into Czech art visual qualities which are better understood in Germany, Austria and thanks to remarkable luminosity also Italy. In the last two decades Zlamal has created his paintings usually by covering a specific figure scene by layers of pigment, which he consequently digs up as an archeologist and again covers by layers of paint until he is „happy“ with the result. Zlamal’s dealing with the phenomenon of time is another element which within the uniqueness of his art connects him both with the tradition of Central European Expressionism and the explosiveness of the Neue Wilde of the 1980s. Despite their complicated painterly and psychological structure, his naturally monumental images seem to be not only unsettling, but also contemplative, because they are ever more literally permeated by the „Zlamal“ light. /Text by Ladislav Daněk, curator of the Museum of Art in Olomouc – Museum of Modern Art, 2009/