I loved a recent exhibition of works on paper from the 1960s-1970s by the late Czech artist Anna Zemánková that was held at Gladstone Gallery in New York City.
Zemánková’s exhibited art pieces are somewhat abstract but broadly hearken to botanical forms and the basic shapes of biology in general, including among even us ourselves. In how Zemánková’s individual forms linked and pulsed, as though animated by something external and lasting that’s just coming into view, I think of the biological construction work that puts us and our living counterparts together, physically.
The artworks point to those shapes taken by our natural world that provide tactile outlines for life in its purest, most direct sense: an embodied renewal. Here, you sense the potential for and drive towards more, pushing against the urge for the present.
Contemplating these works, I start to feel biological life in general as a continuum and a churning, unpredictable, and cosmic process of which we are all a part rather than solely a series of categorical separations.
Every visual surface within Zemánková’s exhibited artworks is animated, and you could imagine that you’re just missing something in your peripheral vision as you look around: a light that brings ambition. You start to sense the multi-conscious drive that we find in our desires to create and to do, which are so persistent: a persistence we find even here, in what feel like microcosms within these artworks.
Even the colors of Zemánková’s exhibited creations alone carry the weight of embodied life. Here on the paper is the sense you get when you see the rich, dynamic color of a real-world, living thing that there’s something behind it: a being, a presence. The art envisions the reach of that life, the embodiment of the living thing, in something as slight as a flash of color or a simple form or collection of forms.
Even there, what or who is behind it all remains.
These artworks’ most minute components are created with and carry the same care and excitement as their largest of visual sweeps, all of which are founded on an emphatically communicated ambition to connect, which is clear even in these up close, aesthetic environments.
The artworks lay out the glaring idea in front of me that what lies ahead otherwise so mundanely can be made holistically new, refreshing its forms, its directions, and its place.
And somehow, as I contemplate this art, what will arrive in the next moment and next glance is itself already here, already beginning to… maybe not form, but to reach. Though Zemánková’s artworks in this exhibition were sprawling, they insisted on visually working themselves out. Here, you can trust the process.
In some ways, we kind of have to do that kind of thing, anyway. So many essential, biological functions are subconscious. And Zemánková makes, in these art pieces, constructive process without specific initiation look so beautiful in its winding unity.
In the artworks’ non-specificity, which creates a space as much as a precise interpretation, meaning — as in, the question of where things are going — feels embedded within the moment-by-moment, sensory experience of the visuals. Co-existing with each individual form is its direction, a matter now of self-reflection along with any external guidance.
If you extrapolate, you could imagine the meaning of life — the direction of our experience of the biological processes that drive us forward — as looking, metaphorically or literally, into the mirror, wresting something of the relentlessly creative forces that define our presence into the open.
The art orients a sense of straightforward process — like the systems of biology — into a context of envisioning fulfillment, considering really every point on these surfaces feels just so new, bursting towards us rather than just remaining in place. The moment-by-moment process of inhaling and exhaling or a flower continuing its growth towards the sun, its sustenance is truly part of a larger, sweeping collection of moments and collections of forms that move together: unity in the ambition of it all.
The artworks make the sensation of the “next” feel enriching and edifying. What’s being made new in front of us manages to coexist with the version of the visual we get the sense was somehow already there.
The spiritual — however you define it — and grand that I think we’re used to thinking of as distant no longer feel so far away in this art. Instead, they’re present. Majesty feels like a material on par with the constructive tissues of plant biology and the rest of the visible world. Here, it’s a facet of the seen just the same.
This exhibition of Anna Zemánková at Gladstone Gallery closed a few days ago, on June 14. Thank you to the gallery.
