The Anatomia Metamorphosis project is devoted to three Czech creators of art brut. Alongside two artists of international reputation – Anna Zemánková (1908-1986) and Luboš Plný (born 1961) – it also introduces the recently discovered graphic artist František Dymáček (1929-2003).
Premiered at the Paris ABCD gallery in 2009, the exhibition was shown at the Muzeum Montanelli in 2011 and this year has enjoyed great success in Japan, in Kobe and Hiroshima. Now Berlin gallery-goers will also have a chance to see it.
The French painter and collector of non-professional art Jean Dubuffet defined art brut as ‚artistic productions of all kinds […] that display spontaneity and great creative imagination while possibly owing very little to mainstream art and cultural models. […] What we witness here is absolutely pure, raw artistic activity which, in its entirety and in its separate phases, arises in the author and his own inspiration.‘
In the same way, the creative output of the artists represented in Anatomia Metamorphosis is original, individual and unique. Yet in spite of this there is a certain commonality between them, in particular one constant and recurrent idea: Zemánková, Plný and Dymáček, each in their own inimitable way, are all concerned with their own physicality, which they subject to various anatomical metamorphoses.
For Luboš Plný creativity is a scientific process. His ink drawings, often augmented with acrylic paint or collage, are for the most part anatomical self-portraits. In them he documents experiments conducted on his own body, which he renders in tomographic sections. A major inspiration was the birth of his son Vincent in 2005, which became a central motif in his work.
Whereas Luboš Plný reveals the inside of the human body explicitly, Anna Zemánková‘s response to her physicality is more subconscious. Concealed behind a dense mask of detail in her elaborately beautiful floral motifs, we detect organic shapes evocative of the physiological processes associated with motherhood. Sometimes she overlays her pastel drawings with crochet appliqué or adds perforations. In this way she has created for us a fantastic herbarium that is literally out of this world.
With František Dymáček, both the creative process and the visual idiom are reminiscent of the drawings of psychic mediums. Using ballpoint or felt-tip pens, he creates dynamic organic structures that evoke clusters of cells or cross-sections of body organs. Dymáček‘s drawings are a cartography of his mental space, a labyrinth guarded by demons that peek out at us from the tangle of his seemingly decorative arabesques.
Curators: Terezie Zemánková, Ivana Brádková
