Anna Zemankova @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC - An exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s

Anna Zemánková 

Gladstone Gallery, New York

May 3 – June 14, 2025

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of drawings by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), spanning her oeuvre from the 1960s-1970s. This exhibition emphasizes the remarkable foresight of Zemánková’s work through an art historical lens, reflecting her trailblazing influence in abstraction and seeks to expand the psychological and spiritual realms of the form. The works in the show comprise rarely seen incandescent botanical drawings and pastel works on paper.

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, Anna 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, Anna 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 in Moravia, Anna Zemánková came of age during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918. This era fostered a fervent patriotism, marked by a devotion to preserving cultural traditions such as folk costumes, songs, fairy tales, and ornamental drawings. These influences ignited Zemánková’s early passion for painting. Though gifted in depicting colorful, realistic landscapes, her parents discouraged her from attending art school, redirecting her toward dentistry. Amid the turmoil of political and social upheaval, Anna Zemánková followed a conventional path: marriage, motherhood, and grandmotherhood—roles that temporarily eclipsed her artistic ambitions.

Zemánková’s artistic rebirth began serendipitously. In the late 1950s, her sons Slavomír and Bohumil discovered a forgotten suitcase filled with her early paintings in the family basement. Recognizing the vitality of these works, they encouraged her to resume painting—a therapeutic act that blossomed into an astonishing late-career surge. Though self-taught, Anna Zemánková was no recluse. Her son Bohumil and daughter-in-law Markét a, both trained sculptors, admired her intuitive genius, as did a circle of cultural figures including artist Jan Reich, filmmaker Vlastimil Venclík, and even First Lady of the Czech Republic, Olga Havlová. Zemánková actively courted public recognition, hosting an open house several times over the years (1964, 1967, 1968 and 1970). Her work was exhibited at Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade in 1966 and later shown at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979. 

In the quiet hours before dawn, she would rise in her Prague apartment, surrounded by real and artificial flowers, and surrender to the classical music of Beethoven and Janáček or the Jazzy Blues of Charles Lloyd. These solitary sessions, lit by the soft glow of imagination, became her sanctuary. With paper as her stage, she conjured a universe of pulsating tendrils, succulent petals, and coiled organic forms—a paradise of biomorphic flowers that blurred the boundaries of reality. 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.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Anna Zemánková and Cavin-Morris Gallery.

“Sure, I’ll draw you something, I’ll draw you one of my fantasies.”

—Anna Zemánková 

ANNA ZEMANKOVA is one of the great artists of the twentieth century and a pivotal figure in the Art Brut pantheon, alongside Jeanne Tripier, Madge Gill, Aloise Corbaz, and Emma Kunz. Her work has been featured in international solo and group exhibitions since 1971, preceding appearances at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2024). Among her most significant exhibitions are Outsiders at London’s Hayward Gallery (1980) and the São Paulo Art Biennial (1981). Posthumous retrospectives include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1997); Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava (2007); Museum Montanelli, Prague (2011); Saarland Gallery and European Art Forum, Berlin (2011); Museum of Art, Kobe, and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2012); and Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (2017). Her work resides in public collections such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden, Austria; and private collections including the abcd collection, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; LAM, Musée d’art Moderne, d’art Contemporain et d’art Brut de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve-d'Ascq; Boston Fine Arts, Boston,and The Museum of Everything, London. 

GLADSTONE GALLERY 

130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.gladstonegallery.com

Amy Sillman @ Gladstone 64, New York - "Mostly Drawing" Exhibition

Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawing
Gladstone 64, New York
January 26 – March 3, 2018

Gladstone 64 presents Mostly Drawing, an exhibition of new works by AMY SILLMAN. This show marks the artist’s first exhibition with Gladstone Gallery.

As the show’s title self-referentially indicates, this exhibition is comprised primarily of works on paper incorporating silkscreened, painted, and drawn elements that continue Amy Sillman’s decades-long examination into the ideological underpinnings of the term Drawing itself. In each work, the artist employs formal dualities from the art historical canon – namely, narration versus abstraction, color versus line, flat versus recessive space, and painting versus drawing – not as a means to a conceptual end, but rather as a method to push these painterly concerns to their extremes. The works on view therefore defy easy categorization, as each one appears to vacillate between overt abstraction and coded figuration, between traditional painting and comic illustration. Yet this simultaneous presentation of dissimilar components does not imply incompatibility. The heterogeneity evident in every composition invites the viewer to resist the pictorial resolutions that one seeks in finished artworks, and instead revel in the liminal space that Sillman creates using her own visual language.

This indulgence in multeity evolves from the artist’s process. Refuting the classic dichotomy of fast drawings and slow paintings, Amy Sillman’s works do not exist within a fixed chronology of creation. Some compositions are made in a day, others in a week, and some over the course of months. What is of primary concern to Sillman is the examination of the hierarchy between media that seemingly exists in artmaking. By refusing to acknowledge any media-specific pecking order within each picture – Are these drawings? Prints? Paintings? Or none of the above? – the artist generates works that encourage an interrogation of art production that is both ethical in nature and engaging in situ.

In relation to their installation at Gladstone 64, Sillman’s excited, overflowing compositions also play with the comfort connoted by the townhouse setting of the gallery. The dialogue between work and location, while seemingly jarring, invites a sense of unease to coexist with the traditional prettiness of modernist architecture. Through this gesture, the artist creates a setting wherein the sensation of comfortlessness is inverted to seem not only allowable, but also desirable.

Two events celebrating the recent publication of Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER (Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse and Portikus; 2017) will be held in conjunction with Mostly Drawing: the first, a book signing at Gladstone 64, on January 27 from 3-5pm; the second, a film screening and signing at Metrograph on March 4.

Amy Sillman: The ALL-OVER

Edited by Karen Kelly, Fabian Schöneich, and Barbara Schroeder

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois and Manuela Ammer, interview by Fabian Schöneich

Design by Ronnie Fueglister

164 pages, 95 illustrations

Copublished by Dancing Foxes Press, Mousse Publishing, Portikus

Amy Sillman was born in 1955 in Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives and works in New York. Since 2015, she has been professor of painting at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Sillman’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including: Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Beginning at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2014, Sillman’s solo exhibition, "one lump or two," traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her works are held in the public collections of such prominent institutions as Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Gladstone 64
130 East 64 Street, New York, NY 10065
www.gladstone64.com