Anna Zemánková [ Frieze Masters ]

The Gallery of Everything presents a solo exhibition of large and small-scale works on paper by Czech artist and image maker Anna Zemánková (1908–1986) at Frieze Masters 2026, presented with the support of the artist’s family.

Bringing together an exceptional group of 25 works across the artist's thirty-year practice, the presentation marks the gallery's first solo exhibition devoted to Zemánková.

At the heart of the presentation is a group of monumental pastel works from the 1960s, previously exhibited by Massimiliano Gioni in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Alongside these are rarely seen embroidered works, revealing the extraordinary material dimension of Zemánková’s practice, as well as a selection of her highly sought-after, intimate postcard-sized drawings.

Zemánková began drawing in her fifties and developed a deeply personal visual language inspired by nature, spirituality and the rhythms of everyday life. Working almost exclusively in the early hours of the morning, she produced intricate compositions in pastel, ink and pencil, later enriching their surfaces through perforation, collage and embroidery. Neither botanical studies nor abstract inventions, Zemánková's visionary images occupy a singular territory between observation and imagination, their extraordinary forms unfolding with the precision of scientific illustration and the freedom of automatic drawing.

Since her introduction to British audiences in the landmark Outsiders exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1979, Zemánková has come to be recognised as one of the defining figures of twentieth-century self-taught art. Her work was created in relative isolation in communist Czechoslovakia, at a time when abstraction and other forms of non-conformist artistic expression were not officially sanctioned within the cultural mainstream. Today, her drawings have increasingly entered a wider conversation around visionary modernism and the histories of abstraction.

Her intensely personal visual language invites comparison with artists as diverse as Hilma af Klint, Georgia O'Keeffe and fellow Czech pioneer František Kupka, whose work similarly sought forms through which nature, spirituality and unseen forces might be made visible.

Like theirs, Zemánková's work speaks to some of the defining artistic concerns of the twentieth century: the relationship between art and nature, the search for spiritual meaning through abstraction, and the invention of visual languages beyond academic convention.

Zemánková's international reputation has been shaped through a succession of significant museum exhibitions, from Outsiders at the Hayward Gallery (1979) and the São Paulo Biennial (1981), to Massimiliano Gioni's The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and Adriano Pedrosa's Foreigners Everywhere at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024).

More recent institutional presentations include The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree at Camden Art Centre, London (2021), and the current retrospective Fruits with a Taste of Potato Dumplings at Gočár Gallery, Pardubice (2026).

Zemánková's work is held in major public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Milwaukee Art Museum; mumok, Vienna; Moravian Gallery, Brno; Museum of Art Olomouc; and LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut.