Anna Zemánková at the Venice Biennale
Foreigners everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa
Following the success of the solo show dedicated to Anna Zemánková at Paris+ by Art Basel 2023, seven works by this artist have been loaned to the 60th Venice Biennale.
The 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere curated by Adriano Pedrosa*, revolve around the figure of the stranger and also focus on the production of other related subjects: “The queer artist, who has navigated through different sexualities and genders, often persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who exists on the margins of the art world, along with the autodidact and the so-called folkloric artist; as well as the indigenous artist, often treated as a stranger in their own country.”
*Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil) is the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - MASP, where he has curated numerous exhibitions, including Histories of Dance (2020) and Brazilian Histories (2022). He was named the 2023 laureate of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, presented by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York.
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.