Untitled, circa 1960. Chinese ink, gouache and watercolor on paper. Signed lower right.
50 × 65 cm. €75,000 / €85,000
A German artist and writer associated with Surrealism and Art Brut, Unica Zürn’s life took a dramatic turn after her parents’ divorce, when she had to leave high school at the age of 16. In 1933, she joined the Universum Film AG studios as a typist, later becoming a film editor and embarking on a writing career. Following a marriage and painful divorce, she began writing serialized fiction and radio plays.
Her encounter in 1953 with Hans Bellmer, a key figure in Surrealism, marked a turning point: she moved to Paris, became close with André Breton, Man Ray, Jean Arp, and Henri Michaux, and began exploring automatic drawing and anagram poems. Her first collection, Hexentexte, was published in 1954. From 1956 on, she exhibited a world populated by hybrid creatures—half-animal, half-plant—in constant states of molting or metamorphosis.
Hospitalized after a hallucinatory episode in 1960, she nevertheless continued her creative work, notably beginning in 1965 the writing of The Man of Jasmine (L’Homme-Jasmin, Gallimard, 1971), inspired by Henri Michaux. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Unica Zürn jumped from the window of her Paris apartment during a temporary leave from the hospital. In the notebook Michaux had given her, he had written:
“Notebook of untouched white expanses
Lake where the desperate, more than others,
Can swim in silence,
Lie apart and come back to life.”
