Eva Švankmajerová was born after the outbreak of World War II in a small town in central Bohemia. Although she graduated from the Department of Puppetry at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, E. Švankmajerová’s main interest was the medium of painting, in which she developed a unique style informed by her love of folk art. In 1968, after the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia, she and her family left the country, but returned after less than a year in exile in Vienna.
E. Švankmajerová then began collaborating with the Group of Czech and Slovak surrealists and contributing to the journal Analogon edited by the literature theoretician Vratislav Effenberger. Joint activities such as the collective authorship of texts, plays, and tactile and other experiments filled the group’s meetings, which often took place at E. Švankmajerová’s family home in the New World district of Prague.

Although painting was her principal medium, a quest for universality of expression led her to work in others, making collages, ceramics, illustrations, and film posters, as well as writing poems and novels. Her affinity for verbal expression can be seen in a series of paintings titled Rébusy [Puzzles, 1966–1968], in which she incorporated scraps of lettering, challenging viewers to solve the riddles presented in them and playing with the ambiguity of meaning and mystery which permeates her work. As a set designer, she contributed to films by Czech New Wave directors, including Evald Schorm (1931–1988), Jaromil Jireš (1935–2001), and Juraj Herz (1934–2018). She worked most closely with her life partner, Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934), influencing the overall concept of his films.

Approaching surrealism on her own terms, E. Švankmajerová not only drew upon her imagination, visions, dreams, and childhood memories, but also commented on her life, her gender experiences, and socialist Czechoslovakia’s political situation. Women’s role in modern society was fundamental to her, and she addressed the subject with playfulness and a biting, offbeat humour. She parodied such works as Sandro Botticelli’s (1445–1510) Birth of Venus and Giorgione’s ( 1477–1510) Sleeping Venus in her Emancipační cyklus [Emancipation series, 1968–1969], replacing the female characters with men. Starting in the 1970s, the topics of her paintings gradually shifted from motherhood, reproductive labour, and sexuality to themes imbued with frustration, aggression, and even a touch of horror. Women, her main protagonists, are usually depicted in monumental dimensions but naked, as if powerful and strong, but also vulnerable and exploitable. As in her novel Jeskyně Baradla [Baradla Cave, 1981, transl. 2000], whose main character is both a woman and a physical place, an important motif in her paintings is the space of landscapes and interiors, which often intersect and provide an uncertain refuge for figures who are constantly struggling to survive (Emigrace [Emigration, 1981]). E. Švankmajerováʼs work has been exhibited and is known internationally, albeit mostly in the context and as a part of filmmaker J. Švankmajerʼs oeuvre.