Jennifer Caroline Campbell finds some powerful contradictions in the alluring work of Anna Zemánková at The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters 2026
My eyes are stuffed full of art, and my thoughts are beginning to glitch under the bright white lights. I head out of the main Frieze tent and walk through the park towards Frieze Masters. Hyped dogs, skittering squirrels and October sky make a welcome pallet cleanser. My eyes are so crammed with visions of art that I feel tempted to lie down on the grass and close them. But more findings await in the other swarming tent that takes its yearly place here, the one that claims to contain the produce of masters.
But what is a ‘master’ in the artistic sense? A cynical voice tells me that its anyone whose work has been around long enough for time to anoint it with romance and legitimacy. Hence the price tags at Frieze Masters. Another voice argues that its anyone who has gained mastery over a process or medium, anyone capable of creating a masterpiece. But what is a masterpiece? The underlying question remains unsolved. Perhaps it is this unsolved-ness that provides the key.
Gertude Stein had a few things to say on this topic in her 1936 lecture ‘What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them’. Ironically, one of her first points is about the inadequacy of spoken language in this matter: 'It is impossible to talk about masterpieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation.'
I agree. Nonetheless, I will see how far written language can get me in this review. If a masterpiece artwork does exist, my first criteria is that it must somehow add up to more than the sum of its parts, and I don’t mean in monetary worth. How it does this is mysterious and should, indeed, be hard to talk about. My next criteria are to do with proximity to words. I am wary of any artwork that is too efficient in its response to words, too easy to pin down with words, or that fits too slickly into categories defined by words.
A wariness of the explicable in art makes me think of Jennifer Higgie’s influential book, The Other Side, A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. One of the things Higgie does in the book is to unpack her changing preferences towards art, after having worked at Frieze magazine for over 20 years:
I became increasingly attracted to artworks that resisted my often-hasty attempts to understand, justify or ascribe value; works that slowed me down and challenged my assumptions about art and meaning.
Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side, A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, 2023
I find myself on the same page as Higgie in this preference, especially when caught in the intense rhythm of looking that an art fair can induce. Maybe this is why it was Anna Zemánková’s work, at The Gallery of Everything booth, that stayed with me most vividly this year, rising to the surface of my crammed eyes like cooling after-images.
Zemánková did not consciously position her practice in relation to artists such as Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Janet Sobel and another of my favourites, Madge Gill, whose work was shown by Gallery of Everything at last year’s Frieze Masters. Yet I see Zemánková as sharing the same net as them, the common thread being the exploration of something unconstrained by reason, and until recently, a certain exclusion from art history. This net is populated by a rich variety of artists that cannot be unified under one approach. It is a wide net, and one that has always, like an untethered spider’s web, floated in and out of the main story of art, never sitting fully inside of it. The artworks that occupy this net, like a constellation, grow from and reach towards, a shadowy beyond that evades direct illumination.
Despite the trial blazing and influential originality of these artists, somehow the gatekeepers of art overlooked them for decades. This is despite many of their contemporaries, such as Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollok, following similar lines of enquiry and influence, such as the work of Carl Jung, or inexplicable creative impulses. Perhaps it was the double problem of being both outside of what the critiques of their time expected a serious artist to be, in combination with modernity’s wariness of anything that broke from the purity of so-called rationalism.
Modernity was assumed to be cool, sleek, rational: an art movement that eschewed the superstitions of the past. Jennifer Higgie, ibid
For me, the strongest of Zemánková works are the ones that challenge the rational part of my brain, the part that attempts to categorise what I am looking at and put it into a neat box. Her later works, which depart from recognisably botanical forms and shift into something stranger and more fantastical, are the ones that I find compelling. Sometimes these compositions seem like the mappings of elaborate containers that invite my thoughts to flow around and through them. Many of her forms have a sense of curling inward while others, often in the same picture, point outwards, giving a sense of containment and its opposite, concurrently holding on and letting go. This is one of many contradictory features that emerge during the process of looking at these works.
Zemánková’s well balanced use of colour and distribution of line provide a charismatic agility, meaning that on first glance the strangeness of these works can be easily missed. However, this initial impression of ease soon gives way as overlapping paradoxes unfold. Her works are simultaneously ordered yet unpredictable, familiar yet alien, ornamental yet alive. The more I look, the more questions emerge. Are they unplanned diagrams, outlandish flora, the tracks of thought waves, magnified phantasmic microorganisms, surrealistic references to the body or expressions of flavourful symphonies? They are of course none of these and all of them. When asked, Zemánková said she could not say exactly where her inspiration comes from. She said that it is connected to a certain deep feeling but ultimately, it is a question mark to her.
An interest in certain overlooked artists who are driven by more mysterious impulses has gained momentum in recent years. The release of Higgie’s book, as well as the 2023 Tate exhibition Hilma Af Klint and Piet Mondrian, Forms of Life have undoubtably influenced in this momentum. Appreciation for the likes of Houghton, af Klint, Sobel, Gill and Zemánková is becoming a widely accepted part of the art landscape.
Often, the artists in question share a self-driven approach, having found alternative ways to develop their creative output. It wasn’t until her 50s that Zemánková was able to engage in her art practice with focus and regularity, there wasn’t much time for it before then. Despite this late start she made thousands of works, each one building on the last. By working beyond the prescribed routs and officially recognised institutions of their time, the quality of artworks made by artists like Zemánková challenge established cultural value systems, because it is those very institutions that have historically decided what constitutes a ‘masterpiece’.
Although some would not like to admit it, especially those tasked with selling timeless masterpieces, the consensus on what defines a masterpiece is always changing, responding to circumstance and culture. Which raises the question, is something about the current state of the world causing a shift towards the appreciation of artists who work outside the established value systems of their time, and who follow unexplained impulse over the reasoning deemed officially necessary for a serious art practice. Perhaps in an increasingly turbulent and unstable world, it is a natural response to collectively question what has meaning, especially those meanings built on profit and intellectual hierarchy. Perhaps also, a world that increasingly asks us to measure and justify every move, for box-ticking or profit margins, produces a thirst for anything that escapes the hollowing-out that this incessant measuring so often produces.
Something of this unmeasurable quality is what kept me looking at Zemánková’s work. The artworks tell me that her daily practice was not aimed at carving out an answer, fitting into existing structures, or solving something. Rather, it was a perpetual returning and diving deeper into a specific mystery. Her works feel like the result of a ritualistic expanding rather than a pinning down, each work an opening of possibilities.
At best magical thinking is fluid; it can expand the ways we perceive our bodies, our societies, nature; it’s about possibility. Jennifer Higgie, ibid
Several biographical influences can be traced in Zemánková’s work, including Moravian folk art, ill health, music, grief, the telling of fairytales and motherhood (see Jennifer Higgie’s e-flux essay on Zemánková for more on these). But I will just choose one to leave you with. As a dental technician, Zemánková must have spent a good deal of time looking into mouths. This brings my thoughts back to questions about the limits of language. There is a kind of magic in an artwork that makes visible what cannot be said. If one looks for long enough inside the heads of other humans, via their unspeaking mouths, maybe something inexplicable forms in the silence, something of the body, but also beyond it, something that is more than the sum of its parts.
Jennifer Caroline Campbell
Anna Zemánková
The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters
14-18 October 2026
