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November 5, 2019 – Review
Emma Kunz’s “Visionary Drawings”
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Emma Kunz never called herself an artist. Whether she designated herself in any way is unknown, but her principal activity was research and healing using a pendulum and natural remedies, a practice in which drawings played an integral part. A solo exhibition at Muzeum Susch presents more than 60 of these untitled and undated works, produced from 1938 until her death in ’63. Created in collaboration with London’s Serpentine Gallery, where a show of Kunz’s drawings ended in May, this exhibition features a different selection of works and also a different setting. The museum has softer edges than many: built on the site of a twelfth-century monastery in the Engadin region of Switzerland, with galleries burrowing into the rock, the institutional setting establishes that Kunz’s images can speak on their own terms as art.
Kunz worked on millimeter graph paper, finely marked with brown or blue lines, which she cut into large squares and rectangles to produce around 400 drawings. Framed drawings tile the walls of the tall galleries or are hung singly. A few are laid flat on square plinth-like vitrines, reflecting how Kunz made them. She used pencils, crayons, and oil crayons, which she applied mostly in …