Anna Zemánková
retrospective
curator : Pascale Jeanneret, curator at the Collection de l’Art Brut, and Terezie Zemánková, art critic and independent curator.
La collection de l’art brut consacre une grande rétrospective au travail de la créatrice d’origine tchèque Anna Zemánková (1908 – 1986) que nous représentons depuis 2010. Cette présentation est organisée en étroite collaboration avec la famille de l’auteur, qui s’applique depuis de nombreuses années à valoriser son œuvre.
A cette occasion, la Collection de l’Art Brut a réuni une large sélection de près de 130 dessins issus de son fonds et de l’importante collection familiale, dont beaucoup seront montrés pour la première fois et d’une collection privée tchèque. L’exposition est accompagnée de documents d’archives, d’un film inédit sur Anna Zemánková et simultanément parait une importante publication.
The Collection de l’Art Brut proudly presents a major retrospective of works by the Czech creator Anna Zemánková (1908 – 1986).
The event has been set up in close conjunction with this creator’s family who, for many years now, has sought to promote Zemánková’s oeuvre. To that end, the Collection de l’Art Brut has assembled a large selection of nearly 130 drawings from both its own holdings and the family’s private collection: many of these are being shown for the first time.
Works from a private Czech collection will also go on display, together with archival documents, a to-date-unreleased film on Anna Zemánková and a major monograph.
It was in the early 1960s that this Moravian woman began producing a body of work for which her humble background had not prepared her and which responded strikingly to injunctions from the innermost depths. Thus, at a time when the demons of the night were still competing with the seminal iridescence of dawn, she would gather strange flowers in her mind before drawing them forth on paper. ‘‘I grow flowers that don’t grow anywhere else,’’ she used to say. Anna Zemánková is already an established figure in the art brut, so much so that in 2013 she was honored at the 55th Venice Biennale before an important group of her works joined the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2020.