Anna Zemánková

Clearly the best known Czech proponent of art brut, Zemánková trained as a dentist and worked as one until the birth of her child. Before getting married she had dabbled in landscapes, but never integrated this interest into her later work. She was almost fifty when she began this late oeuvre, her three children now grown up. Her life lost the fixed contours which had always been directly linked to the family. It was her sons, seeing that she was irascible, disgruntled and existentially dissatisfied, who persuaded her to take up art after finding pictures from her youth in the attic.

In her first tempera paintings Zemánková attempted to capture the beauty of real plants, though copying reality was not in her blood. She preferred to work with impressions held in her memory, which she supplemented with her first phantasmagorical elements. Very quickly she liberated her huge imagination, which poured out pictures previously hidden in the unconscious. Even though her flowers were often transformed into animal-like forms, she remained true to the basic principles of the plant world – they grew from somewhere, they grow flowers, they yield fruit. The most varied pleasing and unpleasing feelings are expressed in plant form, the artist’s internal message.

She would start work early in the morning, when automatic gestures would give the first form to the future picture. During the day she clarified matters and added hundreds if not thousands of repetitive details. Over the years her paintings became more and more subtle, ethereal, dematerialised. Her compound flowers are reminiscent of a glowing flare heading upwards. They are a metaphor of her desire to break free of burdensome physicality and to attain a transcendental dimension. “From the Depths Upwards” is the title of one of her pivotal works, and could stand as the principle of the whole of her output.

Zemánková selected her technique relatively impulsively. She often used kitchen oil to make her pastels more transparent. She added ink and ball-point pen to tempera and pastels. In her later work she used perforations, pressure, embroidery, crocheted objects, work with textile and paper collages, and added artificial diamonds, pearls and sequins to her drawings. In doing so she was drawing on the principle of bricolage characteristic of art brut. Every element had its symbolic meaning and was another step in the direction of attaining the coveted beauty and perfection, which was to outdo that created by nature. The creative act remained for Anna Zemánková a magic ritual and the meaning of life. Thanks to her internal tranquillity she overcame difficult circumstances which fate threw at her, for instance her diabetes and the resulting amputation of her leg.

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