Citations
“Ritualization was typical of Ms. Zemánková’s creative process. This feature is quite common in the works of artists of her genre. […] The image, however, had not been preconceived in detail. It evolved later, while she was actually drawing it: the ultimate mind-set, the immediate psychic state of mind or mental condition of the artist herself was being reflected and expressed in the motor activity of her movements when drawing. These movements, of course, already irritated visually by the incipient drawing, were instantly, with a retroactive effect stimulating her psyche. Hence, perhaps, her gestic ornamentism springs from, and is close to, drawings created within spiritualistic activities and to the works of artists influenced by surrealism (for example André Mason) or is even close to the artistic expressions of the mentally diseased.”
Vykoukal, J.: Paní Zemánková, Cheb, GVU 1990
“Her graphic ability to combine is amazing. She juxtaposes things that are, at first sight, incompatible. The images and forms that come as a result bear the stamp of mediumistic inspiration. It is the automatism of creation and the faith in spiritual contents of reality, reflected in her work, that she has in common with the mediumistic works of art.”
Nádvorníková, A. : l´art brut - umění v původním (surovém) stavu, Praha, GHMP 1998, s.55
“[…]The distinctly feminine character of Anna Zemánková`s work - her fragile “bricollages” - is as astonishing and fascinating as perhaps the drawings and embroideries of Jeanne Tripier or Magde Gill. Her invention, though, appears to surpass both of them: her cryptogrammic erotic flora ripens into confusing fruit, the far too suspiciously gracious forms possessing bosom-like shapes and other disquieting symbols or hiding places…”
Nádvorníková, A. : l´art brut - umění v původním (surovém) stavu, Praha, GHMP 1998, s.55
“The mysterious esotericism of Zemánková’s art work attracts a number of art critics, some of whom consider it to be a herbarium of flowers from a different planet, thus they understand her art as a bundle of the unknown and unprecedented. This causes the art critics to be more preoccupied with, concerned about, and interested in the sources of this mystique, the ciphers of imagination, fantasy, and narration, rather than the process of visualization of impulses, their evolution and formulation or the aesthetic sum of particular symbols, every single one of which being a sole completed work of art on its own. Incidentally, the real meanings and interpretations of symbols - if not indicated by the artist herself in the title – are most of the time beyond our decoding abilities anyway. All the more so, that the vegetative ornamental shapes and figures are in fact purely masks hiding the content. But this is deliberately part of Zemánková’s grand poetic game.”
Pohribný, A. : Oinirické vize Anny Zemánkové, Muzeum umění Olomouc 1998, s.15
“It might have been electromagnetic impulses, revealed through gestures, that drew Zemánková’s attention to something lying within the grasp of common sensation. These gestures, coming somewhere from inside, especially those loose S-shapes or curved spirals drawn with the elegance of a music conductor, may confess some introverted tendencies. At the same time they represent archetypal symbols of great natural phenomena known for thousands of years. As if their sovereignty had been transferred into Zemánková’s artistic performance, they have become the crucial element in most of her linear images. These lifted her to the world of autonomous creation of the inimitable and hence unintentionally to the representation of invisible powers. Did she realize she emerged at the ”crossroads” of the ornamentally vegetative and the cosmological?“
Pohribný, A. : Oinirické vize Anny Zemánkové, Muzeum umění Olomouc 1998, s.17
“[…] It is a new paradise, flora and fauna – birds and butterflies. Its bright colors and ornamental layout correspond to inconstant configurations of concealed games of imagination and perpetual metamorphoses pervaded by continuous stream of psychic activity. Sterile and idle mechanical decorativeness of the traditional ornamentality is not to be found here. This mental vegetation possesses its own atectonic laws of growth, inner dynamism similar to the one of Lesage`s architecture; an order entirely unique and incomparable to anything else but itself.”
Nádvorníková, A. : Labyrinty fantazie, Olomouc, Divadlo Hudby OKS 1982
“The traditional folk art is also likely to have served as inspiration for Zemánková. She was clearly familiar with these traditions, and apparently even collected some examples of folk costumes. Her drawings reveal many elements in common with embroideries, paintings on church pews and doorposts, and ornamental ceramic glazes dating from the 18th-20th centuries; it is tempting to suggest that these intriguing parallels might have been the result of an internalized communal design sense. Zemánková’s own use of embroidery techniques on her later drawings further emphasizes this similarity. Any debt that she had to this cultural traditions was probably subconscious, however, as she reworked those motifs in a manner unfamiliar to and divergent from that tradition.“
Farb Hernandez, J.: The drawings of Anna Zemánková, In: Raw vision, n. 14, 1996, s. 43
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