Unica Zürn: Alben

Unica Zürn: Alben. Edited by Erich Brinkmann. Epilogue by Rike Felka.Hardcover, 8.75 x 11.5 in. / 336 pgs / 300 color / Edition of 800 copies.Pub Date 6/30/2010, Mint copy as issued in hardcover without dust jacket, pristine! Fantastic book of Zürn’s incredible and surreal drawings, German language.

The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with the German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Drawn to the movement’s espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux’s declaration that “the hand dreams,” making a vocation of these techniques with drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: “After an initial moment when the pen ‘swims’ hesitantly on the 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.” This lovely limited-edition survey reproduces drawings done between 1954 and 1967.

“ Unica Zürn has long been a semi-mythical figure. Little known and in many ways unknowable, she is inevitably associated with the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, whom she met at a Berlin show of his work in 1953. Obsessed throughout his career with realistic female dolls whose body parts could be endlessly manipulated, penetrated, removed, multiplied, decorated and otherwise reconfigured to posit flesh and bone as the material of a recombinative fetishism, Bellmer had worked and lived with other women before Zürn. (He’d also been married, and had fathered twin daughters.) But upon meeting Zürn he declared, ominously enough, “Here is the doll.””
—-Gary Indiana, from A Stone for Unica Zűrn

$ 350.00