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Anna Zemankova
Czech nationality
Born near Olomouc, Moravia, on August 23rd, 1908
Dies in Prague on January 15th, 1986
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| "I grow flowers which grow nowhere else", used to say
Anna Zemankova. She is raised in a family dominated by her mother. Her father
is a hairdresser. Her sister, dead prematurely, is always cited as exemplary.
Anna marries an officer in 1933 and gives up her job as a dental assistant
in order to devote her time to her children. She has first two sons and
then a daughter. 1939 is a tragic moment in her life: her first son dies
and Moravia is taken over by the Germans. |
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| After the war, her family settles in Prague. In the
50s, Anna has several episodes of depression. Suffering from diabetes, she
has to have one leg amputated, then the other one. |
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| In 1960, at the age of fifty-two, half way through
her life, she starts drawing. Anna Zemankova, conscious of her middle class
background, a perfect grandmother, starts painting and drawing and gluing
elements that look like plants and disturbing carnivorous flowers. A strange
little old lady who, in a state of trance (this is why she has been sometimes
thought of as a medium), gets up every morning at 4.00 a.m. and draws until
7.00 a.m. Her unusual world is filled with flowers, plants, crochet hooks,
finely worked tissue papers, flattened, pushed in or broken up with extreme
care and precision. A "feminine" activity more appropriate for decorating
Christmas trees or making table mats for wedding gifts, but which here takes
on a different life. |
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| Isn't this a sign that Anna, in her own way, wants
to break away from her traditional role as a housewife? Getting older, and
feeling that she has nothing to lose, is she giving a new meaning to her
life? A rebirth and a will to take up the story where it had been interrupted;
when she was an adolescent, her father had discouraged her from going to
art school. Anna's flowers do not come from a herbarium of another planet,
from unknown places in the universe, but from her own world, buried under
the layers formed by a life full of sacrifices. |
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| SEE ALSO: Oniricke vize Anny Zemankove,
texts of Arsen Pohribny, Pavel Konecny, Jiri Vykoukal, Jan Krizek, Jo Farb-Hernandez,
Alena Nadvornikova, Jenny and Jan Hladikovi, Muzeum umeni Olomouc, 1998.
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