Illustrator Ana Zavadlav’s exhibition presents the originals created for Italo Calvino’s book Italian Folktales. Through a spatial installation, the illustrations shift from the two-dimensional world into three-dimensional space. The exhibition shows the process from sketches to the final illustrations created for the extensive collection of folktales. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth, the book was translated by Gašper Malej and published last year by the Mladinska Knjiga Publishing House.
»I looked for the spaces in between, images that would accompany the folktales, not illustrate them.«
Ana Zavadlav, interview with Nina Zagoričnik on radio Val 202
More than sixty years ago, the writer Italo Calvino selected two hundred folktales of varying motifs from the extensive Italian storytelling tradition and compiled them into a conceptually extremely well thought-out and stylistically uniform book collection. It quickly attained the status of a classic in Italy and was translated into numerous foreign languages. And how could it not have been! Calvino’s folktales are populated by picturesque heroes and full of surprising plots; they are imbued with humor, light and a characteristic vitality that shines through even the cruelest events. All of the above also applies to Ana Zavadlav’s illustrations.
The folktales are sparse with descriptions of landscapes and protagonists. They only say: a garden, an overgrown forest, a princess, beautiful as the sun, a witch, ugly as mortal sin… Readers or listeners are invited to fill in the fairytale images in their own way, using their imagination and their experience of concrete, real spaces. In her illustrations, Zavadlav did not break up this elusive quality of vagueness, drawing the landscapes where the folktales take place, half real, half folktale, instead of the events themselves. It is as if she clearly saw in her imagination the locations where the folktales took place, and transferred them to paper with a skillful hand so that we too could see them. In the same breath, she invited us into them: with a path that opens before the reader’s gaze, with a slightly ajar door to the garden, with the image of a mysterious princess with her back to us, inviting us to try to see her face…Zavadlav complemented the drawn fairytale locations with the human and animal heroes who inhabit this fairy-tale world, though we will search in vain for depictions of the most characteristic fairytale characters among them: an ogre with feathers, a devil, a seven-headed dragon, a witch… The illustrator generously leaves these to our imagination.
Ana Zavadlav (1970) is an academically trained painter and illustrator. She graduated from the department of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana and completed her studies there with a specialization in graphics. Since 2002, she has devoted herself mainly to illustrating books for children and young people. She is a regular contributor to the Ciciban and Cicido magazines. Her works have been displayed in several solo and group exhibitions. In 2019, her illustrations from Toon Tellegen’s book The Cricket and his Dark Feeling were displayed at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. In 2023, some of the works from this exhibition were displayed at the fair as part of the Italian Excellence. Illustrations for Italo Calvino contest, in which 30 illustrators, selected from a total of 521 authors from 47 countries, interpreted Calvino in their own, innovative ways.
