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Emma Kunz – Visionary Drawings: exhibition guide

Serpentine Gallery, London, 23 March – 19 May 2019. "An exhibition conceived with Christodoulos Panayiotou." Curated by Melissa Blanchflower with Natalia Grabowska. Text of the printed exhibition guide (PDF, filed here as sources/ingested/serpentine-emma-kunz-exhibition-guide-2019.pdf), in reading order, followed by excerpts from the exhibition page. The list of events is shortened. Text as published.

The wiki's reading of this source is on Emma Kunz — How the Drawings Were Made.

Where this guide disagrees with other sources. It dates Work No. 020 to 1939 and tells the story of the atomic-bomb prophecy. Anna Kipke, citing Heiny Widmer's notes, dates the drawing 1959 (sources/ingested/kipke-politiken-der-innerlichkeit-2021.md). Its "three books" are Kunz's book of poems Leben (1930) and one booklet of 1953 published under two titles with the same text.

Introduction

Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963, Switzerland) considered herself primarily a healer and researcher of nature, yet predicted that her legacy of over 400 drawings would be seen by future generations. Despite not receiving a formal art education and never exhibiting during her lifetime, Kunz is now considered a prolific pioneer of spiritual art. Contemporary artist Christodoulos Panayiotou (1978, Cyprus) has developed a continued interest in Kunz and how her drawings might be perceived today. He was invited to collaborate with the Serpentine Galleries' curators on the research and display of the exhibition, which is the first to present Kunz's work in the UK.

Kunz discovered her gifts for telepathy, prophesy and healing at an early age and practised as a naturopath, dedicating her research to the restorative energies of plants and minerals. In 1938, at the age of forty-six, she first began making large pendulum-assisted drawings. She used radiesthesia as a drawing technique, where she would pose a question to her divining pendulum and discover the answer within the geometric drawing she made from recording the pendulum's swings, starts and stops onto graph paper. She was known to work continuously on each drawing for periods that could stretch over twenty-four hours.

Kunz sought to gain a greater understanding of nature and the world through these drawings, and her questions to the pendulum ranged from the political to the philosophical and personal. The works are not titled, rarely dated, and Kunz refused to record their particular meanings. For her, each combination of colour, shape and thickness of line, drawn with graphite and colour pencils, held significance. Acknowledging her drawings' potential to offer different readings over time, or to hold layers of meaning, Kunz would use existing drawings as guides to diagnose patients seeking her help for ailments of the body and mind. Her drawings are visual manifestations of her spiritual and philosophical research.

Kunz's work was first exhibited posthumously in 1973, and she has since gained recognition through numerous group exhibitions. Her practice is underpinned by her belief in a holistic worldview. Systematic yet expansive in their compositions, her energy-field drawings simultaneously contain micro and macro perspectives of nature and the cosmos. She never viewed her extra-perceptions as miraculous, instead recognising that materialisation and industrialisation had buried mankind's connection to nature, and believing that in her case these natural intuitions had simply remained intact. Kunz's drawings chime with current discourses on ecology, as well as the necessity to forge meaningful connections with the environment.

Christodoulos Panayiotou often uses materials charged with history, politics or hidden narratives in his work. For this exhibition, Panayiotou has created benches from the healing stone discovered by Kunz in 1942 at the Roman quarry in Würenlos. This quarry is now the site of the Emma Kunz Zentrum and Grotto, which opened in 1986 to preserve Kunz's spiritual findings and to extract the healing rock. Named AION A by Kunz, meaning 'without limitation', it is still available as a refined mineral remedy in pharmacies across Switzerland. Kunz continually returned to this quarry, with its harmonising effects and energies, in order to recharge her body and soul like a battery. Visitors to the Serpentine are invited to sit on Panayiotou's benches, which occupy a space between exhibition design, sculpture and energy source, to contemplate Kunz's multifaceted practice.

In an extract from a letter addressed to Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, Panayiotou writes:

…We have discussed several options, a number of works, different potential encounters; but today, they all seem forced to me… I shall add only a series of benches for Emma Kunz. I see them as viewing devices. They shall allow vision rather than be seen.…

When we first met, you gave a book as a present. It was Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence. I went back to it on Sunday, it reads: 'At the Barnes Foundation museum, this painting merits the patient and intense concentration of an observer seated on the bench across a small room where the work resides. Placed by the museum's founder Dr. Albert C. Barnes, that bench greatly improves the view. For, as Paul Klee wrote in The Thinking Eye, "Didn't Feuerbach say: For the understanding of a picture, a chair is needed? Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind." ' …

Biographies

Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) was a Swiss healer, researcher and artist. She did not receive a formal art education, yet in her lifetime she self-published three books and produced hundreds of geometric drawings, which were first shown posthumously in 1973 at Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau and later in Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976. Swiss curator Harald Szeemann included her work in Visionäre Schweiz in Kunsthaus Zürich, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid and Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1992). Other group exhibitions include Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (1992) co-curated by Bice Curiger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Bernard Macadé, and more recently World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton – Hilma af Klint – Emma Kunz, Lenbachhaus, Munich (2018), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum, New York (2012); Gwangju Biennale (2010) and 3 x Abstraction, New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin at The Drawing Centre, New York, Santa Monica Museum of Art (both 2005) and IMMA, Dublin (2006).

Christodoulos Panayiotou (b. 1978, Cyprus) is an artist based in Limassol, Cyprus and Paris, France. His wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time. Forthcoming exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, London (2019) and Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2019 – 20) and selected solo exhibitions include Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2017); the 56th Venice Biennale, The Cyprus Pavilion (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis (2012) and Kunsthalle Zurich (2010). His work has also been shown in a number of international survey exhibitions including: the 14th Lyon Biennial (2017); the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017); 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012) and 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012). He participated in the Serpentine Park Nights (2015) and Serpentine Poetry Marathon (2009). Panayiotou also founded The Island Club in Limassol, Cyprus, an artist-run exhibition space.

Texts on single works

Work No. 012. Emma Kunz's drawings are predominantly abstract in structure and form, although a small number are figurative. Work No. 012, often referred to as Philosophy of Life, is understood as a diagram of man within the cosmos, an image of Kunz's worldview. The vertical axis of the drawing signifies the upward path of enlightenment. The horizontal axis, which forms a crucifix, positions man between evil on the left and good on the right, represented by interlocking male and female figures. Man begins existence head downwards in a birth position, within darkness, rising upright to transcendence.

Work No. 020. Emma Kunz lived and worked in rural Switzerland. She began making pendulum-assisted drawings in 1938 before the outbreak of the Second World War. She would ask the pendulum questions relating to current world affairs such as the outcome of future meetings between political leaders, or Switzerland's neutral status and on one occasion she attempted to 'depolarise' the negative energy of Hitler. While Kunz did not generally date her drawings, or record her interpretations, it is known that Work No. 020 was made in 1939. Kunz predicted from this drawing that America was developing a weapon capable of destroying the world. She was so alarmed by the potential misuse of this new source of energy that she uncharacteristically interrupted the completion of the drawing to telephone her friend. The prediction came true six years later with America's catastrophic detonation of Atom bombs on Japan in 1945.

Work No. 117. Art historian Dawn Ades has written on Kunz's complex compositions: 'Kunz's drawings are immediately striking for their size, precision, colourfulness, complexity and variety. At first they can appear to be repetitive, their variety overlaid by misleading associations with the spirograph and with the symmetrical shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope. It soon turns out that what appeared to be the kinds of repetitions and simple symmetries typical of these devices is an illusion. The drawings are on a visually immersive scale; the viewer's gaze switches between detail and whole, taking in the overall, often pulsating rhythm of the meticulously precise lines. Symmetry is often illusory, as with Work No. 117, whose four elongated yellow diamond shapes have three different internal square patterns.'

Work No. 190. The pyramid is an ancient symbol that embodies a powerful connection between the earth and the universe. Work No. 190 is Emma Kunz's final drawing, made shortly before her death from cancer in 1963. She wrote: 'With this last picture I have opened the seventh chamber of the pyramid. My researches are now finished.'

Captions

All images courtesy Emma Kunz Zentrum.

Events (shortened)

Saturday Talks by the curators Natalia Grabowska (30 March) and Melissa Blanchflower (18 May). AION A: A Workshop on Emma Kunz's Healing Practice (31 March), in which "homeopath Jacqueline G. Schaerer leads a practical workshop on the uses of Kunz's healing rock, AION A". Saturdays Live: Tabita Rezaire, MerKaBa for the Hoeteps (18 May). The third instalment of the symposium series The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, subtitled with Plants (19 May, EartH, London), "was inspired by Emma Kunz's profound relationship with her garden and the plant life within it".

Excerpts from the exhibition page

The page opens with a sentence of Kunz's: "Everything happens according to a certain regularity which I sense inside me and which never lets me rest." It calls the show "the first UK solo exhibition" of Kunz, with "over 40 of her rarely seen drawings".

On the method: from 1938 she made "large-scale drawings" by "radiesthesia – a drawing technique where a divining pendulum plots the complex and linear compositions of her drawings made on graph paper", "working primarily with graphite and colour pencils", "intensely and continuously on each drawing for a period that could stretch over 24 hours". "She never recorded their particular meaning and none are dated or titled."

On the future: "Never shown in her lifetime, Kunz predicted her drawings were destined for the 21st century."

On the garden: "She also used the pendulum to polarise marigolds in her garden to produce multiple flower heads and documented the result with extraordinary photographs." A photograph is captioned "Marigolds polarised by Emma Kunz, 1953".

On AION A: the rock "is still sold in chemists in Switzerland, mined from the same quarry, and used to treat a host of health issues from joint and muscular pain to inflammatory skin disorders".

It quotes Harald Szeemann: "Her gift was an awareness of connections that contradicted both normal experience and scientific interpretations of the laws of Nature and art." Her drawings "are the records of her concentration on the question of the Whole."