Otto Herbert Hajek †
German sculptor. He was born in Kaltenbach, Czechoslovakia, in 1927. He studied at the „Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart“ from 1947 to 1954. His sculptural work began in 1950 with figurative wooden pieces. The non-figurative bronzes (from 1956) were called Spatial Knots and Spatial Layerings. The spiky forms and the rough and indented surfaces of his sculptures, moulded using the lost-wax technique, demonstrate the close relation of his work to Art informel, for example Spatial Knot 64 (1958; Ravensberg church).
In the 1960s the sculptures, while maintaining their large number of joints, were stripped of surface encrustations as Hajek began to move towards geometric constructions. Spaces are created in these works through intermeshing systems of braced concrete beams and articulated through the addition of paint, which takes on certain plastic functions. The tracks of paint drawn over the sculptures—many of which may be walked over—led Hajek to use the term “Farbwege”, Paint Paths for these works, for example in “Spring in Frankfurt “ in 1963 to 1964 in Frankfurt. He displayed his artworks in the exhibition “Documenta 3” in Kassel in1964. In setting up series, mathematical arrangements of brightly coloured, horizontal, vertical and angled structures alternating with diagonal courses, he achieved a dynamicization of space. He organised many displays in several countries in cooperation with the “Goethe-Instituten”, Universities, and Art- academies.
He became Professor in 1978, received the Federal Cross of Merit in 1982. In 1994 he received the Medal of Merit for the “Land Baden-Württemberg”. From 1996 on he was a proper member of the European Akademy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg. He lived in Stuttgart. 1998 he received the Franz Kafka Arts Award from the European circle and the Great Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Otto Herbert Hajek died in spring 2005.