Anna Zemánková

Probably the most famous Czech author of art brut, she trained as a dentist in her youth and worked as a dentist until her children were born. Before her marriage, she occasionally devoted herself to landscape painting, which, however, is not in any way compatible with her later work. She did not come to it until she was on the verge of fifty, when her 3 children were grown up. At that time, her existence lost its solid contours, which had always been directly linked to her family. Impetuous, disgruntled and dissatisfied, she was driven to create by her sons, who discovered pictures from their mother's youth in the attic.

In her first tempera paintings, Zemánková tried to capture the beauty of real plants, but she was no stranger to copying reality. She drew on perceptions tucked away in her memory, which she supplemented with her first fantasy elements. Very soon she unleashed her powerful imagination, which brought to the surface images hidden in her subconscious. Although her inflorescences often transform into animal shapes, they still respect the basic principles of the plant world - they grow from somewhere, give rise to flowers, bear fruit. The plant form encapsulates all kinds of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, the inner message of the author.

She always started creating early in the morning, when the initial forms of the future image were born from automatic gestures. During the day, she refined them and added hundreds and thousands of repetitive details. Over the years, her drawings became more and more subtle, ethereal, disembodied. Her confluences resemble flares just lit up, pointing upwards somewhere. They are a metaphor of her desire to break free from the oppressive physicality, to reach a transcendental dimension. "From the depths upwards" is the title of one of her seminal works, and this is how the whole principle of her work can be characterised.

Zemánková's choice of techniques was rather impulsive. Often she used kitchen oil to make her pastels transparent. She complemented the tempera and pastel with ink and ballpoint pen drawings. In her later works she perforated, embossed, embroidered, applied crocheted objects, worked with textile and paper collage, and incorporated artificial diamonds, beads, and sequins into her drawings. She thus fulfilled the principle of bricolage, which is characteristic of art brut. Each element had its symbolic meaning, it was another step towards achieving the desired beauty and perfection, which was to surpass what nature had created. For Anna Zemánková, creation became a magical ritual and the main meaning of life. She found complete satisfaction in it, thanks to which she overcame with inner peace even such wounds of fate as severe diabetes and the related amputation of her legs.

sourse of the biography: artlist.cz