Anna Šimková (*1978) studied drama education at the Theatre Faculty of the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno and Associated Arts Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. She spent part of her studies at Københavns Universitet and Højskole på Helnaes in Denmark and on work placements in Norway and the Netherlands. She has been researching the phenomenon of free play and dramatic improvisation for a long time. She is fascinated by the liminal moment, when one lets the transformations of situations and oneself flow without preparation and in a relaxed state, to extreme unknown positions. She applies a similar principle in her drawings: she does not strive to depict sensory perception, her own emotions, thoughts or ideas, but leaves space for free, unrestricted energy, which chooses its own shape and direction. It seems to become a drawing itself, while remaining a neutral observer. This dichotomy, whereby it makes itself disappear in order to paradoxically create a space for experiencing unknown forms of itself, is likened to principles inherent in dramatic art: Theatre also works with an alienating effect that allows the whole process to be observed from the outside.
Šimková creates without ambition for recognition and presentation. Her drawings are made irregularly, in bursts, usually over a short period of time, often in series recording different stages of phenomena that evoke moments of the emergence of existence in the universe, the poignancy of life as a firework that explodes and glows surrounded by cosmic sleep, moments of security and confidence in the state of existence and the silence of non-existence, the perception of the other as identical. He never returns to the finished drawings, never dates or signs them, leaving them in a kind of timelessness from whence they emerge.
