Eva Švankmajerová passed away in October last year at the age of 65, and with her death ended one of the most fascinating husband-and-wife artistic teams in the contemporary art world — not just on the Czech scene, but internationally.

A retrospective of Švankmajerová's work at the Václav Špála Gallery spanning more than four decades presents her as a fiercely courageous artist apart from her husband, visual artist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. "Diary 1963–2005" is an exhaustive show of surrealistic paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and film props.

Švankmajerová worked closely with her husband on his movies in various capacities, initially as a costume and production designer, and later as art director. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that she was an integral conspirator in all of Švankmajer's film projects, including his most recent release, Lunacies, which is based on works by Edgar Allen Poe and perverse sexual escapades chronicled by the infamous Marquis de Sade. Other key works include Conspirators of Pleasure, Little Otik and The Faust Lesson, bizarre films that combine animation, live actors and puppetry.

Working together, the raw sexual energy and keen intellectual engagement of the Švankmajers' projects is astounding, not only in film, but in all media. Individually, the two artists extend the ideas and themes of their joint projects.

In Švankmajerová's case, the work is consistently concerned with femininity and feminist issues. While there is still a seam of complicity with her husband and his obsession with kinky sex and all of its combined pleasures and pitfalls, her work portrays the psychological aftermath of sexual relationships to a much greater depth than Jan's.

Švankmajerová's paintings and drawings from the 1960s have "scandalous" characteristics that she kept throughout her career. Big-hipped women, in the mode of Colombian painter Fernando Botero, are set in various blurry or surrealistic backgrounds, more often than not engaging with erect penises, as in I Don't Think This Bumblebee Has Flown Much With Pollen. Overall, in Švankmajerová's work, life appears to be one big erotic mash of male and female genitalia, clear and simple.

In 1970 she joined the Czech surrealists and associated herself with them and the publication Analagon throughout her career. Her extremely personal and sexual themes were able to evolve without provoking much government consternation, since they were always camouflaged under the guise of surrealism, which was tolerated under communism mainly because the famous surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon, as well as the Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, sympathized with the left.

Over time, Švankmajerová went beyond the boundaries of this movement. Her works from the 1970s best illustrate her departure from mainstream surrealism, as much of her work from this period is rooted in the unglamorous realities of her personal life. Little Václav (1976) shows a humongous, almost grotesque baby boy who is larger than the apartment buildings next to him. Throughout the show there are sets of small black-and-white photographs of the artist with her husband, other family members and friends. Photos of Švankmajer and her child placed near paintings such as Little Václav make this retrospective an unusually personal, biographical tour of her life that can sometimes be unsettling.

None of the paintings is titled as a self-portrait, but many reveal inner conflicts in the form of symbolic self-portraits. There is a painting titled Solitary Animal (1977) that depicts a woman with a wolf's head and face split into two parts: one side roaring and the other benign. Another work from the same period, Ringmistress (1979), shows an extraordinarily fat girl manipulating a small male doll figure, which is clearly meant to be Jan.

Family issues are portrayed in paintings such as School Curses (1987), with little Václav seated at school with his feet and legs on fire under the desk. Above him, heavy clouds push his head down toward the desk. In Father and Son (1982), two male figures are forcefully pushing in different directions while hopelessly tangled up in each other. (Václav Švankmajer is also a filmmaker.)