Unica Zürn (1916-1970) - Female Self, Mental Health & Artworks
Immersed in the study and reflection of a seemed perception of different realities, Unica Zürn, questioned her female self from external perspectives reflected as an extension of herself, in her texts and artworks.
As a source of creation and inspiration, she observed and staged herself amongst chimeric animals, from a distance, taken from her own body, betraying the schizophrenia with which she lived.
LEFT: UNICA ZÜRN, UNTITLED, 1965. RIGHT: UNICA ZÜRN. © VERLAG BRINKMANN & BOSE, BERLIN.
Unica Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry — poetry with the constrained form that either each line of each verse is an anagram of all other lines or verses in the poem— and the semi-biographical novellas Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural and ethereal gifted skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin.
In 1950 she participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition.
In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer.
UNTITLED, 1959.
