CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/12/2018

Weird and beautiful: Anna Zemánková

One of the weirdest books on our list this season, as well as one of the most beautiful, Anna Zemánková is the first major English-language monograph on this fascinating self-taught Czech painter, draftsman and pastel artist who began drawing when she was more than fifty years old, getting up at 4:00AM daily to enter a trance-like state, "as if dawn could put her in a state of ecstasy conducive to attracting the magnetic forces emanating from a parallel world." An eventual double-amputee who suffered from depression, she also crocheted yarn into curtains, tablecloths, lampshades, pillowcases and hats, transforming her home into an "iridescent bubble." Featured image, a pastel, was produced in the early 1960s.