Ana Zavadlav: Landscapes of Calvino' fairytales | Exhibition

From 14 October to 13 December 2025, you are warmly invited to the illustration exhibition by Ana Zavadlav.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Tuesday, 14 October 2025, at 19:00.

The exhibition of illustrator Ana Zavadlav presents original works created for the book Italian Folktales. Through a spatial installation, the illustrations move from the two-dimensional world into space. The exhibition reveals the creative process from sketches to the final illustrations produced for Italo Calvino’s extensive collection of fairy tales.

More than sixty years ago, writer Italo Calvino selected two hundred thematically diverse folk tales from Italy’s rich storytelling tradition and wove them into a conceptually refined and stylistically cohesive collection. The book quickly achieved the status of a classic in Italy and has since been translated into many languages.

Readers and listeners are invited to fill the images of the tales with their own imagination and experience of real, tangible spaces. In her illustrations, Zavadlav does not attempt to define this elusive quality of openness; instead, she depicts the landscapes in which the tales unfold—half real, half magical. It is as if, in her imagination, she clearly saw the spaces where the stories took place and, with a skilled hand, transferred them onto paper so that we too might see them. At the same time, she invites us in: with a path opening before the viewer’s gaze, a half-open gate leading into a garden, or the image of a mysterious princess seen from behind, beckoning us to try to glimpse her face.

The imagined fairy-tale spaces are enriched by human and animal characters inhabiting this magical world. Yet, among them we will not find the most typical fairy-tale figures—the ogre with feathers, the devil, the seven-headed dragon, or the witch—for the illustrator generously leaves these to our imagination.

The exhibition will be closed on Friday, 31 October, and Saturday, 1 November, due to public holidays.