“I am growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else”: the fantastical botanica of an Art Brut genius
The work of Czech painter, draftsman and pastel artist Anna Zemánková (1908–86) defies easy definition and categorization. As a self-taught artist, Zemánková tends to be described as Art Brut, but her Art Brut is of a mysterious and magical strain. Her work gives the viewer the impression of entering a herbarium of fantastical extraterrestrial plants or a unique, imaginary world, always created by the artist using newly discovered and often surprising techniques.
This extraordinary new publication presents a representative selection of Zemánková’s drawings, collages, objects and assemblages, accompanied by texts written by experts and researchers including Roger Cardinal, Eva Kotátková, Terezie Zemánková, Manuel Anceau, Pascale Jeanneret and Bruno Decharme. These are not staid scholarly essays; each contributor tries in their own way to understand the inherent mystery of Zemánková’s art. Readers are invited to join them on a journey through Zemánková’s visionary work.

Anna Zemánková

Arts & Photography

Anceau, Manuel

Decharme, Bruno

Kotatkova, Eva

Zemánková, Terezie

Jeanneret, Pascale

Konečný, Pavel

History & Criticism

Kant

Adolf Wölfli is the original outsider artist. Before Darger, Rizzoli and Rodia, there was Wölfli: orphan, laborer, criminal, artist and the subject of a 1921 monograph titled A Psychiatric Patient as Artist, authored by his doctor--the first publication on an outsider artist--which won him the admiration of André Breton and Jean Dubuffet, and gave birth to the outsider phenomenon. “Wölfli’s creations treat the eye to a roller-coaster ride through a terrain bounded by Piranesi, biblical myth, illuminated manuscripts, tantric mandalas and Swiss cuckoo clocks,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith once wrote--“in other words, a dizzying multi-cultural universe.” Adolf Wölfli: Creator of the Universe is the most comprehensive publication on Wölfli ever published. It surveys his entire artistic and literary oeuvre, scrutinizing his intricately detailed drawings and collages and explicating his complex personal mythology. Translated here are texts such as Wölfli’s “Short Biography,” written shortly after his arrival at the Waldau Clinic in Bern, in 1895; his astoundingly bizarre list of inventions; and other prose works, alongside Wölfli’s doctor’s 1921 catalogue essay and other critical examinations. Visual and textual selections are included from the epic From the Cradle to the Grave, in which the artist recounts a fictitiously idyllic childhood; the Geographic and Algebraic Books, which describe his elaborate cosmology; and the St. Adolf Giant Creation, a chant in which Wölfli transposes music into abstract sounds and numbers. Orphaned at the age of ten, Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) was arrested for sexual crimes in his late 20s. Upon his second arrest for such offences, in 1895, he was admitted to the Waldau clinic in his native town of Bern, Switzerland, where he soon began to draw, eventually amassing an oeuvre of thousands of works on paper. After his death, the Adolf Wölfli Foundation was formed to preserve his art.

Adolf Wölfli: Creator of the Universe

Baumann, Daniel

Förster, Eric

Arbor Vitae

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Books by Anceau, Manuel