Anna Zemánková said that she exclusively created flowers—apparently, she felt a natural affinity to them, surrounding herself not only with fresh flora but also its plastic counterparts. Her fertile, colourful overflow of drawings, paintings, and collages overwhelms and can even occasion delirious nausea in the fortuitous curator examining her sizable archive. What makes her story so fascinating is that it began quite late, around the year 1958, when she was about 50 years old. Back then, her sons found a small suitcase in the attic that was full of simple paintings. When they learnt that she had painted them, many decades ago, they persuaded her to take up work on paper again, for amusement. Their mother was going through a personal crisis and experiencing long-term discontent; her children had long left the nest and didn’t require her care anymore, while the relationship with her husband was disharmonious. She was holding in an inordinate amount of energy that needed to explode.
Her yearning for creative realisation arrived out of the blue and only began as a means of self-preservation and pleasure—the meticulous labour brought her satisfaction and a deeper potential for becoming “her own person.” Soon, diversion became a necessity. She would wake up around four in the morning and start to paint while listening to classical music, unable to create in silence. Her hand first covered contours of the largest volumes, then it turned to shape the smaller units, and finally, it came upon the lacing of tiny details. Her former practice as a dental practitioner manifested itself in her meticulousness—in the filigree fillings and arabesques of her artworks.
Anna’s creative impetus originated somewhere deep inside and was an intuitive, rather than rational process—once her hand had drawn a shape, that shape instantly birthed another. The author claimed that she could not trace the exact source of her imagination, nevertheless, the work encouraged her to free herself from matter and to harmonise her soul. Although these facts might evoke spiritualism in art—Hilma af Klint’s works might surface in the mind’s eye—she never spoke about any divine power at play. Being a self-taught artist, she had to devise her own method—the faith in her ingenuity became her driving force as well as a source of pride.
We may assume that her aesthetic preference was informed by the folk costumes of the Haná region, herbariums, memorials, the exalted quality of baroque, or perhaps even the decorative curves of art nouveau. However, even a mere glimpse assures us that these plants were not formed from terrestrial matter. They often vibrate with an ominous mystique, and in her drawings, we may occasionally observe alien bodies and formations (she was a firm believer in extraterrestrial civilisations). It is sometimes unclear whether we are standing face to face with objects of orders of magnitude a few times lower or higher—witnessing tissues and division of cells, seaweed, amorphous protozoa, or planetary explosions. This mental vegetation defies the laws of physics, and the only thing binding it to Earth is that it indeed usually grows upwards. Otherwise, it exists in a vacuum rather than in humid air.
Anna took pride in her unique and nonrecurrent output; permutations of vegetation as language, inner structure, and subject of her work. Various authors dealt directly with ontological processes and the libidinal desire to self-impregnate in their interpretations of her work because the world of plants naturally invites such reasoning. However, the matter she created is otherworldly, more enticing and succulent than nature itself—at times, even sinful.
The artist discovered, even invented techniques on her own terms, not having received any formal art education. Initially, she worked with pencil and tempera paint, watercolour, then with dry pastel, oil pastel, and crayons. There was a time when she used to cover her drawings with cooking oil to seal them and provide translucence—it didn’t occur to her that the oil would soak in and leave an unsightly stain around the contours. She composed collages out of paper snippings or satin, then sewed beads and sequins into them. With a needle, she punched through paper and embossed it with reliefs.
At her home in communist-era Prague, she built a private “fairytale kingdom,” surrounding herself with kitschy things. That’s because—according to her family—she preferred conventional beauty in her living space. In her artistic practice, it was the other way around—she seems to be bolder in her creative expression. Often, she had to exert an almost superhuman focus to produce tens of thousands of dots and lines in the drawings’ details, without errors and smudges, with the skill and rigours which would have also been necessary for her former job.
at Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna
until October 8, 2022