Olaf Hanel

photo: Private archive of Rostislav Šíma
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Olaf Hanel was born on 21 January 1943 in Prague. His father, originally a German from Sudetenland, worked as a clerk in the Kolben-Daněk factory during the World War II and committed suicide at the end of April 1945, a few days before the liberation. Olaf, his siblings and his mother immediately moved from Prague to the Highlands to Světlá nad Sázavou, where he grew up and attended an art school run by the painter František Antonín Jelínek. In 1960-1965 he studied at the Pedagogical College in Pardubice, where he met many important people, for example Jan Steklík and a little later Karel Nepraš. At that time he also began to publish his first drawings in magazines. From the mid-1960s onwards, he created a number of land art events around Světlá nad Sázavou. In 1967-1971, he held the position of director of the Gallery of Fine Arts in Havlíčkův Brod, from where he had to leave after the onset of normalization. From 1971 he lived in Prague and established intensive cooperation with the Křižovnická School of Pure Humour without Wit, which marked the beginning of conceptual events, and organised a number of so-called patriotic tours. He first worked at the Army Film and later at the Construction Geology, from where he was dismissed after signing the Charter 77 declaration. During the Asanace operation, he was forced to go abroad and applied for political asylum in Austria, where he travelled in February 1979. He subsequently moved to Canada, where he lived and worked for almost another twelve years in Sherbrooke, Montreal and Toronto. As part of grants and scholarships, he undertook a creative residency in Scotland and his wire pieces of art have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Argentina and European countries. In 1991 he returned to Czechoslovakia and worked as a curator at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague for almost twenty years. At the time of recording he was living in Lysá nad Labem (May 2022).