Paraphrasing the famous painting Sleeping Venus by the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, the painting Sleeping Venus by the surrealist Eva Švankmajerová was created in 1969. Instead of the ancient goddess of love sleeping naked in a peaceful landscape, it shows a naked man. The oil painting from 1969 has now been purchased by the prestigious British Tate gallery for its collections.
Czech Center London reported on the acquisition at a time when the world is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the creation of surrealism.
Eva Švankmajerová, who lived from 1940 to 2005, created the work as part of her so-called emancipation cycle. Similarly, in the 1960s, she replaced female characters with men in ironic paraphrases of classical works by Peter Paul Rubens, Édouard Manet and Sandro Botticelli, in which she deliberately used a naïve technique.
Eva Švankmajerová and Jan Švankmajer in 2004 with her painting Monkey Alki. | Photo: CTK
Some of the paraphrases were on display at this year’s exhibition of Švankmajerová and her husband Jan Švankmajer in the GASK gallery in Kutnohora. “Eva suffered terribly from being a woman. She took it as a wrong of fate, she grew up between two brothers, a younger and an older one, and she felt that the parents were nagging the sons that they wanted her to be their maid. It was a very complicated relationship. So she did her emancipation cycle,” Švankmajer said during the guided tour.
Most recently, Sleeping Venus, along with other selected works from the emancipation cycle, was presented this month at London’s Frieze Masters fair, where it was brought by the UK’s The Gallery of Everything. Next year, the legacy of Eva Švankmajerová will be commemorated by a large retrospective exhibition at the Dox Contemporary Art Center in Prague, which is being prepared by curator Anna Pravdová.
This year, the publishing house Kavka Books published a new monograph of this important painter, scenographer and writer. It was prepared by surrealists František Dryje, Bertrand Schmitt, Jan Švankmajer and Šimon Wikstrøm Svěrák.
The Tate Gallery purchased the Sleeping Venus painting as part of the Frieze Tate Fund, which it established in 2003 to acquire works from the Frieze London and Frieze Masters fairs. Thanks to him, she acquired over 170 works in her collection.