Eva Švankmajerová: From the Interior

Fijalkowski, Krzysztof and Fijalkowska, Rachel (2023) Eva Švankmajerová: From the Interior. International Journal of Surrealism. (Submitted)

Abstract

Eva Švankmajerová (1940-2005) was a leading artist of the post-war Czech and Slovak surrealist group. Though primarily known as a painter, her practice also extended into graphics, ceramics and a fertile collaborative partnership with Jan Švankmajer. The focus of this paper is Švankmajerová’s imaginative and deeply personal exploration of identity, gender and the body in the context of domestic environments and objects through artworks that seek, in František Dryje’s words, to unmask “everything false, everything which camouflages, everything with which people deceive themselves”. The snares of domestic environments, objects and roles become spaces in which to renegotiate identity through ‘painting from the interior’, an identity bound up in Švankmajerová’s complex and sometimes anguished response to the construction of gender within post-war Czechoslovak society.

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