Eva Kmentová, born in 1928 and a lifelong resident of Prague, began sculpting in the 1950s and quickly rose to the top of the art world, due to her uncanny ability to inject movement and emotion into classical forms of sculpture. Most of her significant works were produced in the 1960s. Considering the political and social climate of the time, it's not surprising that the sculptures carry themes of apocalyptic hope, transformation and movement within a gray and seemingly immobile vacuum.

Walking through her retrospective at Galerie Mánes is like touring an archaeological site. Head, one of the many pieces in the show, looms large and sage over the room, with its long, rectangular nose, broad forehead and full lips making clear reference to ancient African art. The head looks like a ruin, as if it were once complete but is now missing pieces, exposing the brain within.

Her ability to create a sense of movement with rough, industrial materials comes not only from her use of line and understatement, but from her vision, which turned her pieces into seemingly living, breathing entities of plaster, concrete and tin.

Tree is constructed of cleanly cut slabs of concrete arranged in the static form of a tree. It cleverly moves and sways with the wind from the street as visitors enter the gallery. The piece is startling in its beauty and its lightness, especially considering its material.

Kmentová also created movement in static forms for subject matter other than nature. Themes such as desire, anxiety and avoidance run throughout much of her work. From a series of cutout paper legs glued to a canvas and nearly running off the page, both Haste and Hurry suggest the desire to flee, possibly to avoid something or to leave and start anew elsewhere. Similarly, the sculpture Torso of Fear in twisted blue tin exerts a foreboding power over many of the more hopeful pieces in the hall.

A woman who struggled with her own mortality and died an untimely death at 52, Kmentová expresses a combination of hopefulness and anxiety in all of her pieces. Just as in Tree, the sculptures Fruit and Vessel, created from tin and patinated plaster, respectively, not only show movement, but their rigid materials radiate warmth and energy.

While several of Kmentová's sculptures, as well as drawings and paintings, contain within their many layers a theme of apocalypse, it does not seem to be viewed by the artist in a negative light. Rather than meaning an end, it offers the chance for transformation.

Still, some of the artist's later work has more fatalism, such as the sketch A Place Where Nothing Grows, a drawing of a patch of nothingness amid grass; Proč, with hundreds of scraps of paper formed into a flower with the Czech word for "why" written on it; and Unnamed (Shots), a plaster board with the suggestion of blood seeping from bullet holes. The majority of these pessimistic pieces were created after 1968, once again showing the echo of the Czechoslovak political climate — this time, the repressive atmosphere that followed the Russian-led invasion.