Publisher's Synopsis
Emma Kunz (1892-1963) was a Swiss healer and artist. Born to a family of weavers, she showed abilities of telepathy, prophecy, and as a healer early in her life and began to exercise her divining pendulum as a young adult. Never formally trained in art, she also began in 1938 to produce large-scale, delicate geometric drawings using her divining pendulum and based on questions she encountered and visions she had, proving to be an accomplished and even visionary artist nonetheless.
The fascination of Kunz's art has never been greater than it is today. Created under a secluded way of life far removed from any art scene, her works exemplified already 80 years ago what today we take for granted: an expanded concept of creativity that rejects the question of art or non-art and incorporates a wide range of activities: research, medicine, nature, as well as the supernatural, magical, animistic and visionary.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland, which has already staged the first-ever public display of Emma Kunz's drawings in 1973, this book puts her drawings and activities as a healer in dialogue with the work and positions of contemporary artists such as Agnieszka Brzezanska, Joachim Koester, Goshka Macuga, Shana Moulton, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Mai-Thu Perret. Alongside some 120 illustrations, mostly in colour, the book features essays on spirituality and esoterism in contemporary art as well as interviews with these artists.
Text in English and German.
