Eva Švankmajerová

Christopher Masters wrote an obituary for Czech painter Eva Švankmajerová, who died on October 20 (Surrealist artist who explored the pain of women's role under communism, November 15) for The Guardian:

During the 1960s, Švankmajerová also began to show her gender stereotypes in art. Her Emancipation Cycle parodied such paintings as Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe by replacing the female characters with men; in 1967, she tackled a greater taboo by constructing Stalin's face out of smaller figures and scraps of lettering. Her use of double images, in which a single form simultaneously depicts more than one subject, effectively prepared her for joining the Czech surrealist group in 1970. She was encouraged by the group's leader Vratislav Effenberger, who was later to create a photographic "portrait" of her in metaphorical terms: a gorge crossed by a bridge hewn from the living rock.

I had never even heard her name before, but the article intrigued me. Here is a selection of images of her work. This painting (Majakovsky's Waistcoat, 1994) is also a doozy.