Svankmajerová's organic and provocative imagery appeared in many of her husband's films, helping to lend it the special, disturbing magical quality that has captivated audiences around the globe for generations. Svankmajerová's final work, a collaboration with her husband on his new film Lunacies, will be viewed by many emotional audience members in Prague next month.

But whatever alchemy she worked with her co-conspirator husband — most recently seen in Otesánek (2000), for which she created a wondrously warped fairy tale that jumps to life to warn us of the perils of mindless consumption, but also in the earlier Faust Lesson (1994) and Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) — her work as a painter clearly also stands on its own.

During her joint retrospective with Svankmajer last year, "Food," Svankmajerová's distinctive sensual, personal style touched reviewers and spectators alike in works such as Emigration (1981), a fine painting of a naked woman tiptoeing away from the Prague's National Museum, negotiating her way across dissolving parquet flooring and into unclear waters.

Her dreamy paintings present the world with troubling scenes of angst, and this courageous, sardonic artist embraced warped and broken imagery, arresting color and the landscape of Prague.

Recognized as a master of New Figurative Painting, which evolved out of an earlier period of abstraction, Svankmajerová melded her writerly instincts with her art, using a narrative form in her paintings to communicate stories through symbols.

The "Emancipation Cycle" was a particularly wry series of paintings in which she replaced many of the famous female nudes of the world art canon with men. Such irreverence, combined with her love for depictions of the absurdities and frustrations of daily life, placed Svankmajerová securely in the hearts of her Czech audience.

In the great tradition of the form, dating to the artists of the First Republic such as Toyen, surrealists have boldly explored inner feelings, the psyche, the senses and the darkest corners of the mind. Many such artists were persecuted under the Nazis and the communists for their wild, playful and revolutionary art. Like these avatars, Svankmajerová forged her own path, heedless of the consequences.

The legendary surrealist Salvador Dali once said, "Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making." Such is the role of any artist, perhaps — to hold up a mirror that reflects not what we'd like to believe we are but what we really are.