| Unica Zurn: Dark SpringApril 17, 2009- July 23, 2009
“All her life obsessed with faces, she draws faces. After an initial moment when the pen
“swims” hesitantly on the white paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is
only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings
and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another.” Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine (1967)
New York, February 16, 2009 – From April 17 through July 23, 2009,
The Drawing Center will present Unica Zürn: Dark Spring, the first
major museum exhibition in North America devoted to the work of
the German artist and author, Unica Zürn (1916–1970). The exhibition
will foreground the role of drawing in Zürn’s artistic career and
will bring together for the first time 50 ink and watercolor works on
paper spanning from the early 1950s until her death in 1970, as well
as related texts, photographs, and personal correspondence. Unica
Zürn: Dark Spring is curated by João Ribas.
Already an established author in postwar Berlin, Zürn was introduced
in the early 1950s to the practice of automatic drawing, and
to the Paris Surrealists with whom she would collaborate and exhibit,
by her partner, Hans Bellmer. Though largely unrecognized contributions
to late Surrealism, the resulting drawings and texts, the
majority of which were produced during an intensely productive two
decades also marked by a series of mental crises, are imbued with the movement’s fascination with the
poetic force of madness and Zürn’s own vivid experience of illness. At once playful and haunting, Zürn’s
body of work in drawing evinces one of the most febrile imaginations of the past century, tragically cut
short by her suicide in 1970.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Unica Zürn was born in Berlin-Grünewald in 1916, and lived and worked in Berlin and Paris. From the mid-
1930s, Zürn first worked as an archivist, editor, and artistic advisor at the Berlin-based German national film production company, UFA, before devoting herself
to writing. Zürn produced numerous expressionistic
short stories that were published in German newspapers
throughout the 1950s before moving to Paris with
German Surrealist artist, Hans Bellmer. During the following
decade and a half, Zürn produced paintings and
drawings while living in Paris, becoming acquainted
and exhibiting with many artists in the Surrealist circle,
including André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and
Marcel Duchamp. From 1953 to 1964, Zürn composed
nearly 124 anagram poems, many of which provided
the central framework for her later experiments with
prose, including her autobiographical novella, Dark
Spring (1969), and more avant-garde texts such as Im Hinterhalt (1963) and Die Trompeten von Jericho
(1968). In the early sixties, she began suffering a series of mental crises leading to intermittent hospitalization
during which she continued to draw and write poetry. In October 1970, having been released from
a clinic, Zürn returned to Paris and Bellmer; on the morning of October 19, Zürn leapt to her death from
the balcony of the apartment the couple shared on the rue de la Plaine—as she had described in the last
pages of Dark Spring.
Recommendations of Unica Zurn: Dark Spring
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