Eva Švankmajerová: Woe to the Painting…

The exhibition will present the full range of the work of Eva Švankmajerová, a painter, poet, stage designer, writer, and leading artist of the Czech surrealist movement. In addition to her free creation (paintings, drawings, sculptures), it will also feature her original ceramics, painted furniture, and decorations for Jan Švankmajer’s films as well as designs for movie posters.

After graduating from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (where she specialised in stage design for puppet theatre), she focused on free creation and contributed artistically to the films of Jan Švankmajer, Jiří Brdečka, and Juraj Herz. She also collaborated with the multimedia theatre Laterna Magika. From 1964 to 1968 she was a member of the Máj Group, and from 1970 until the end of her life she was a part of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Eva Švankmajerová’s art combined her admiration for the naive work of Henri Rousseau with surrealistic imagination and sarcastic humour in a completely original way. The fundamental themes of her work included the female body and the fate of women in a society dominated by men. However, she approached these topics with her own relentless irony and self-deprecation, also subjecting emancipation efforts to this same sarcastic wit. She explored the imaginative possibilities of images through various techniques, and her entire body of work is permeated by themes such as eroticism, humour, alchemy, and nature but also domestic life, family, and women’s roles. Poetry was, of course, fundamental to Švankmajerová, whether she expressed it through painting, drawing, sculpture, verse, or text, and the creative process itself was more important to her than the resulting artefact.

Curated by Anna Pravdová in collaboration with Jan Švankmajer.