Designblok 2020

At Designblok, Hanus Lamr presented two installations, one of them in collaboration with his wife, the designer Zlatka Lamrova. Both exhibits reflect the major theme of this year’s local design festival: passion. For Hanus, it’s unequivocally nature and the world around us.

The unique and mysterious spaces of a former Benedictine monastery in Smichov have become the ideal setting for a Bosch-like installation of bronze and textile pictures. The central moment is an altar of bee honeycomb celebrating nature. Detrital fragments of natural materials echo the extant frescoes in the Gabriel Loci spaces.

“I intentionally stepped away from classic ‘customized’ shapes, and I’ve presented the pure essence of nature here,” says Hanus Lamr. “Here you’ll find bee honeycombs in a frame, so in the same form as when they’re inserted in a beehive. One is made from molten glass, another from bronze; the third is real. For me, bees are really one of the symbols of life on Earth,” adds Lamr.

Designer Zlatka Lamrova also admits to dark inspiration from Bosch. “The embroideries are inspired by plants, whose pattern was nature itself or old atlases,” says Zlatka Lamrova. As though from the paintings of the Dutch genius, here an appearance is made by a touch-me-not shooting forth human forms, or an evening primrose blooming at night and swarmed by bats. The main embroidery depicts Adam and Eve surrounded by plants mimicking human shapes. “By randomly scattering red currants, a face appeared in front of me that was the inspiration for the rest of my image. By observing seaweed on the beach I again discovered a peculiar creature,” explains Zlatka Lamrova about the origin of some of her pieces.

The embroideries and pieces essentially contain half a year of our work together that we spent in a springtime quarantine at our cottage, and again later on down by the sea, for example.”

photo Vojtěch Vlk & archiv Hanuš Lamr