Cosmos Emma Kunz: A Visionary in Dialogue with Contemporary Art

Description

Emma Kunz (1892–1963) was a Swiss healer and artist. Born to a family of weavers, she showed telepathic, prophetic, and healing abilities early in her life and began to exercise her divining pendulum as a young adult. Though never formally trained in art, she began in 1938 to produce large-scale, delicate geometric drawings using her divining pendulum and based on her own ideas and visions—proving herself to be an improbably accomplished and even revelatory artist. The fascination with Kunz’s art has never been greater than it is today. Created in seclusion far removed from any art scene, her works exemplified eighty years ago what today we take for granted: an expanded concept of creativity that rejects the question of art versus non-art and incorporates a wide range of activities, from research to medicine, nature, and the supernatural, magical, animistic, and visionary.
 
Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland—which 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 like Agnieszka Brzezanska, Joachim Koester, Goshka Macuga, Shana Moulton, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Mai-Thu Perret. Alongside some 120 illustrations, most in color, Cosmos Emma Kunz features essays on spirituality and esoterism in contemporary art as well as interviews with the aforementioned artists.