Anna Zemánková’s “Fruits with a Taste of Potato Dumplings”

Most mornings, as the sun was rising, the artist Anna Zemánková—who was born in 1908 in Olomouc, in what was then Moravia and is now the Czech Republic—put a record on her gramophone, listened to music, and drew the wild and wonderful plants that bloomed in her imagination. Leoš Janáček was a favorite; she felt a very particular kinship with her compatriot. In 1903, his twenty-year-old daughter, Olga, had succumbed to typhoid; in 1939, Zemánková’s four-year-old son Bohoušek died from cancer. It was a loss from which she never fully recovered. Like Janáček, who transformed his daughter’s dying words into what he termed “speech melodies,” Zemánková discovered that art-making was a way of articulating the nuances of grief in a way that words cannot. “It’s different notes that I give shape to,” she said.1

Zemánková’s route to becoming an artist was a circuitous one. After a brief period of painting in her late adolescence, she didn’t pick up a brush until she was in her fifties; her job as a dental technician, running her home, and raising her children had left her no time for creativity. In 1958, however, she was menopausal, stuck in an unhappy marriage, and depressed. Her sons, worried about her mental health, bought her paper, pencils, and paint in the belief that art might be therapeutic. They were right. By the time she died at the age of 77, in 1986, she had created more than 3,000 paintings, drawings, and collages.

The largest exhibition devoted to Anna Zemánková’s work has just opened at Gočárova Galerie in Pardubice, about an hour by train from Prague—and it’s fascinating. Titled after one of the artist’s paintings from the mid to late 1960s, Fruits with a Taste of Potato Dumplings, it’s spread over three floors, and includes around 400, mostly untitled works. Groupings range from the intimate to the monumental—on one long wall, 120 collages hum with trippy life and invention.

As the chronology of the exhibition illuminates, over the years, Zemánková’s botanical interests—the curators, Natálie Drtinová (director of the Zemánková Estate) and Pavel Liška of the Gočárova Galerie describe her as a “gardener without a garden”—morphed into a wholly original visual idiom that became increasingly gestural, improvisatory, and fantastical. Purely abstract forms mingle with suggestions of mouths, teeth, rubbery tubes, and fleshy amputations (suffering from diabetes, in later life, the artist lost both her legs). Biomorphic plants and insects, elongated fingers, electrical currents, and patterns derived from Moravian folk art meld and part in seemingly infinite combinations. Colors explode like eruptions of joy and retreat into monochromatic intimations of despair.

As the years went by, the artist’s investigation of materials—many of them domestic— deepened. In the 1970s, she employed crochet, weaving, embroidery, and appliqué to great effect, creating images that swerve between references to the natural world and an increasingly geometric abstraction. At times, she pricked a sheet of paper with a pin to create constellations of thousands of small, raised dots, each of which she encircled with pencil marks. Some of these works became lampshades—one is included here—that filtered light through tiny holes, transforming dark rooms into twinkling night skies.

Although Zemánková had little interest in discussing the work of other artists and wasn’t religious, her approach aligns with a rich cross-section of visionary artists, from the nineteenth-century British watercolorist Georgiana Houghton, who painted flowers and faces emerging from psychedelic swirls, to the mid-twentieth-century Ukrainian American painter Janet Sobel, whose “all-over” approach influenced Jackson Pollock, and the Italian Surrealist Carol Rama, who conjured hallucinogenic visions of life under fascism. Whilst Zemánková’s art is often aligned to Art Brut, given her transformation of the everyday into something magical, and her trust in intuition and free association, Surrealism is surely relevant to any discussion of her work. 

Insisting on Zemánková’s significance to both modern and contemporary art, the curators have interspersed paintings, a video projection, a hand-made book, and sculptures throughout the show by six artists from different generations: Argišt Alaverdyan, Petra Janda, Kristína Navrátil, Karel Malich, Judith Raum, and Barbora Lungová. Their various explorations into the politics of materials, the malleability of organic forms, and the mining of what is visible and what is hidden find echoes in many of Zemánková’s preoccupations. 

The overwhelming takeaway from this moving, important exhibition is the power of the imagination to give shape to a range of feelings and associations in a language that is at once abstracted and figurative, autobiographical and cultural. However, as Zemánková makes clear, to insist on neat readings is to reduce the complexity of what she achieved. Asked about the sources of her inspiration, the artist replied: “Where does it come from? There’s a big question mark hanging over it for me, too. I can’t really say […] sometimes I see something, the sort of deep feeling people have inside them, and it stays with me and I put it onto paper.”2