Unica Zürn's Drawings
I am so glad that VM asked me to see the drawings of Unica Zürn at the Drawing Center . The exhibition brings together for the first time 50 ink and watercolor works on paper spanning from the early 1950s to her suicide in 1970. Zürn was introduced in the 1950s to the practice of automatic drawing by her partner Hans Bellmer. The drawings that came out of that are strangely compelling. They are mostly of animals, but animals combined into one finely detailed mass. From that scaly, feathery mass protrude beaks, webbed limbs, snail-like whorls and finny tails. Most noticeable are the eyes looking out at the viewer from unexpected places. And one eye usually serves as the starting point for the accumulation of lines and details, as the artist described it in The Man of Jasmine (1967): “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...