Jan Švankmajer: From the cycle Natural History Table no. 6

Table from Přírodopis (The Natural History) cycle

1973 – 2012

12/35

print dimensions: 49.5 x 64.5 cm, paper dimensions: 56.5 x 78 cm

The artist says:

At the beginning of the seventies, I started on a mad project: I wanted to create an encyclopedia of a kind of alternative world, Švank-meyers Bilderlexikon. And so I started to map out fictional fauna and flora, and invented  forms of technology and architecture, ethnography and cartography. I got hold old lexicons, price lists, "Brehm" and geographical atlases and started cutting them up and sticking them together according to my own ideas. After two years of work this project remains just a fragment, because as time went I found out that it would be a lifetime's task. I also understood that if a mystifying encyclopedia were to be properly carried out, it was necessary to publish it in print, which seemed utterly impossible in the 1970s. That's why I chose at least ten sheets of collages and by hand converted them into a graphic form of classic etching. This is how the "Natural History" cycle came into being. JŠ