ANNA ZEMÁNKOVÁ

This May, Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s.

May 3 – June 14, 2025

To engage with Zemánková’s art is to enter a realm of fluid metamorphosis. Her compositions pulse with biological urgency, as if each line were a living organism. Untitled (1970s), reminiscent of the zither her father once played at weddings, radiates effervescent yellows laced with electrifying blues, its thorns piercing velvety curves. Fibrous strings extend like tentacles or arpeggios of color. Here, sound becomes substance in a stunning manifestation of synesthesia: a shimmering grid of magnified cork-cells vibrate with Charles Lloyd’s spatial melisma. Zemánková’s visual language thrives on the duality of microscopic precision and cosmic abstraction, a tension mirroring her process—trance-like improvisation guided by innate musicality.

A dentist, mother, and grandmother, Zemánková channeled life’s multiplicities into creations that defy simple categorization. While often compared to mediumistic artists such as Kunz or Klint, Zemánková’s work rarely touches on spirituality directly, instead rooting itself in the subconscious—what the Surrealists termed “pure psychic automatism.” In her quotidian back-and-forth between labor and leisure, Zemánková found a way to forge her cellular patterns into networks of visual information and stimulation, liberating herself from the physical confinement imposed by her diabetes.

Her refusal to title works, another deliberate act of liberation, invites viewers to project their own narratives onto her wildly imaginative botany. Cleaving open otherworldly spaces with her art, Zemánková’s legacy lies in her fantastical elsewhere.

Born from the shadows of personal suffering, her work invites the viewer into a kaleidoscopic garden where beauty and the grotesque intertwine, where music morphs into matter, and where creation itself becomes transcendence.