What connects these two artists from different generations? How do they transfer their different historical and personal experiences into their work?
{...} Images of conception, germination, development and maturation, but also of wilting, dieback and death, play a key role in the works of Anna Zemánková and Veronika Holcová. Their quasi-automatic drawings and paintings produced without rational self-censorship (at least in the initial stages) feature the universal symbols of the egg and of sprouting branches, but also of the purging fire {...}. Holcová's core of incandescence and Zemánková's tongues of fire embody both a destructive force and the irresistible attraction of burning desire – the eternal urge, the interplay of Eros and Thanatos. The duality of light and dark, beauty and ugliness, gentleness and cruelty, joy and suffering, constitutes a mighty undercurrent that feeds the dynamic and {...} narrative nature of the work of both artists.
The image of the archetypal Woman, the main character in the works of both artists, is also bipolar: lover-mother. While in Holcová's case the image is evidently figural, although at the same time ungraspably surreal, in Zemánková's work she appears only in the form of abstracted hints converted into the 'language of flowers'. Eve and Lilith, the victim and the temptress, Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary, the sinner and Our Lady of Sorrows—they are all present here, as too are La Llorona or Medea who was driven to madness and doom by passion. The intuitive practices of the two artists revel in the metamorphosis of forms and shapes that conceal parables from their own personal mythologies as well as the collective unconscious. The creative act is a cathartic ritual which they use to cleanse themselves of nightmares, traumas, distressing memories, but also premonitions and 'visions'. For them, the surface of a piece of paper is like a stage where minor private dramas as well as global catastrophes play out—during the act of creation, the inner and the outer, the sooner and the later, cease to exist. The Self becomes interwoven with the universe into a single space without boundaries.
Anna Zemánková (1908–1986) is considered one of the most important representatives of Art Brut. Her work is and was shown in the international pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 and 2013. This has been preceded by international solo and group exhibitions since 1971. Among the most important were Outsiders at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1980 and the São Paolo Art Biennial in 1981. After her death, her work was shown in museums worldwide, in 1997 at the High Museum of Art Atlanta, USA, in 2007 at the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, in 2011 at the Museum Montanelli, Prague, the Saarland Gallery and the European Art Forum Berlin, in 2012 at the Museum of Art Kobe, Japan and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan, in 2017 at the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. It is part of numerous private and public collections, including Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne; Arnulf Rainer Collection; The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection; L' Aracine; The Museum of Everything; and the abcd/Bruno Decharme Collection.
Veronika Holcová (*1973) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague from 1993-99. In 2002 she received a residency scholarship for the Egon Schiele Center, Cesky Krumlov, in 2002 for the Schwellenmätteli Bern and in 2017 for the Budapest Art Factory. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1997. This was followed by solo and group exhibitions in Prague, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Vienna, Milan, New York. Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. The exhibition „Intriguing Uncertainties" curated by Lóránd Hegyi shown in 2016 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint Etienne, France, and in 2018 at „The Parkview Museum" Singapore – Beijing, helped her achieve great international recognition. Her work can be found alongside private collections in the National Gallery in Prague.
Press release courtesy Galerie Albrecht, Berlin. Text: Terezie Zemánková.
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