Become native again
curator : Julie Crenn
Ten works by Anna Zemánková on loan from the gallery will be shown alongside those of Marinette Cueco and Pistil Paeonia at the Lacoux Contemporary Art Center (France).
Curator Julie Crenn has conceived become native again as a conversation between three artists who share an intimate relationship with the plant world, with the knowledge and power of plants. Three artists who carry an acute awareness of their belonging to the living. Their works are extensions of powerful links with the paths, the physical and mental paths. They act in their places by collaborating with the living, its forces, its visible and invisible part.
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.