Unica Zürn: Dark Spring April 17 - July 23, 2009 Main Gallery, 35 Wooster Street and FAX April 17 - July 23, 2009 Drawing Room, 40 Wooster Street Opening Receptions: Thursday, April 16, 6-8 pm
Drawing Out: Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program April 3 - 10, 2009 Drawing Room, 40 Wooster Street Opening Reception: Thursday, April 2, 5-7 pm
Unica Zürn: Dark Spring April 17 – July 23, 2009 Opening Reception: Thursday, April 16, 6-8 pm Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 18, 4:00 pm
From April 17 through July 23, 2009, The Drawing Center will present Unica Zürn: Dark Spring, the first major museum exhibition in North America devoted to the work of the late German artist and author, Unica Zürn (1916–1970). The exhibition will foreground the role of drawing in Zürn’s artistic career and will bring together for the first time nearly 40 ink and watercolor works on paper spanning from the early 1950s until Zürn’s tragic suicide in 1970, as well as related texts, photographs, and personal correspondence. Unica Zürn: Dark Spring is curated by João Ribas.
Already an established author of expressionistic prose in postwar Berlin, Zürn began experimenting with Surrealist ‘automatic’ drawing and anagrammatic poetry after meeting Hans Bellmer, who would become her long-time partner and collaborator, in 1953. The resulting drawings and texts were made during an intensely productive period for the artist also marked by the onset of mental illness. At once delicate and haunting, the drawings reflect the hidden codes and meanings Zürn found in her cryptic anagrams and depict hallucinatory motifs ranging from chimerical beasts to calligraphic detail hovering between image and writing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST Unica Zürn was born in Berlin-Grünewald in 1916, and lived and worked in Berlin and Paris. From the mid-1930s, Zürn first worked as an archivist, editor, and artistic advisor at the Berlin-based German national film production company, UFA, before devoting herself to writing. Zürn produced numerous expressionistic short stories that were published in German newspapers throughout the 1950s before moving to Paris with German Surrealist artist, Hans Bellmer. During the following decade and a half, Zürn produced paintings and drawings while living in Paris, becoming acquainted and exhibiting with many artists in the Surrealist circle, including André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1954, Zürn produced her first series of anagram poems, Hexentexte (Witches’ Texts) which incorporated ten drawings and provided the central framework for many of her later experiments with prose, including her autobiographical novella, Dark Spring (1969), and more avant-garde texts such as Im Hinterhalt (1963) and Die Trompeten von Jericho (1968). In the early sixties, she began suffering a series of mental crises leading to intermittent hospitalization during which she continued to draw and write poetry. In October 1970, having been released from a clinic, Zürn returned to Paris and Bellmer; on the morning of October 19, Zürn leapt to her death from the balcony of the apartment the couple shared on the rue de la Plaine—as she had described in the last pages of Dark Spring. Bellmer died on February 24, 1975 and was buried, at his request, next to Zürn in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery.
PUBLICATION In conjunction with the exhibition, The Drawing Center will publish Drawing Papers 86: Unica Zurn: Dark Spring featuring essays by João Ribas and Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. The publication will be approximately 100 pages, with 50 color images, and will sell for $20.
FAX April 17 – July 23, 2009 Opening Reception: Thursday, April 16, 6-8 pm
The Drawing Center is pleased to announce FAX, an exhibition that invites a multi-generational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Participants will transmit fax-based work—some seminal examples of early telecommunications art—via the museum’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition, on view in the Drawing Room from April 17 through July 23, 2009. The active accumulation of information—received in real time, in the exhibition space—will include drawings and texts, and the inevitable junk faxes and errors of transmission, creating an ongoing cumulative project concerned with reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, mediation, and generative systems. The exhibition is curated by João Ribas, curator of The Drawing Center, New York, and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and The Drawing Center (available in September 2009). FAX is co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and Independent Curators International (iCI), New York, and circulated by iCI.
Although the technology for transmitting printed images and texts over distance dates from the nineteenth century—a machine for the purpose was patented in 1843 by Scottish mechanic Alexander Bain—it was the introduction of the modern fax through commercially available machines in the 1970s that turned facsimiles into a ubiquitous communications medium for international business. Artists readily exploited its immediate, graphic, and interactive character, making it an important part of the history of telecommunications art, nestled between the legacy of mail art and the nascent practices of new media.
Faxes by close to 100 participants sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of this generative and accumulative exhibition; and subsequent institutions will each invite up to twenty additional artists to submit works to be presented at successive venues as a touring exhibition in collaboration with iCI.
Participating artists include: John Armleder, Tauba Auerbach, Pierre Bismuth, Barbara Bloom, Mel Bochner, Jan De Cock, Peter Coffin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Morgan Fischer, Aurélien Froment, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Joseph Grigely, Wade Guyton, Charline von Heyl, Matthew Higgs, Germaine Kruip, Glenn Ligon, Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, Josephine Meckseper, Olivier Mosset, Steven Pinker, William Pope.L, Seth Price, Pamela Rosenkranz, Dexter Sinister, Wolfgang Tillmans, Edward Tufte, and Christopher Williams, among others.
EXHIBITION TOUR FAX will travel to the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD in the Fall of 2009 and will continue to tour through August 2012. Additional venues will be announced. Please contact iCI’s Curatorial Associate, Frances Wu Giarratano for more information at 212-254-8200 ext. 29 or wu@ici-exhibitions.org.
Drawing Out: Student Artwork from the Drawing Connections Program
April 3 – 10, 2009 Opening Reception: Thursday, April 2, 5 – 7 pm DRAWING ROOM, 40 Wooster Street
From April 3 – 10, 2009, The Drawing Center will present Drawing Out, an exhibition of student artwork from The Drawing Center's program that places teaching artists in downtown public schools. The ambitious collaborative projects made by students in the Drawing Connections program will be featured in the Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street.
Drawing Connections pairs practicing artists with teachers in Lower Manhattan public schools to develop projects that relate classroom curricula to current exhibitions at The Drawing Center. Students experience hands-on museum visits as well as in-school sessions with the teaching artists. Drawing Out will feature cross-disciplinary group projects by 100 students from four participating schools: P.S. 42 Benjamin Altman School, P.S. 130 Hernando Desoto School, H.S. 560 City-As-School High School, and Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School.
Through the Drawing Connections program, third graders at P.S. 42 worked with teaching artist Jennifer Cecere to explore Matt Mullican's exhibition A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking. Contemplating Mullican’s use of line in his text drawings made while under hypnosis and the use of symbols in his self-created cosmology, the students reinterpreted selected Native American texts into their own drawings.
P.S. 130 second graders worked with artist Elizabeth Hamby, also using Matt Mullican’s exhibition as inspiration for their project. The students explored the principles of geometry and the role of perspective, repetition, composition, and scale in importing meaning. Considering Mullican’s signs and symbols, the students created posters illustrating their own system of symbols and meaning.
Ninth graders at Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School and artist Jeffrey Gibson engaged in a round table discussion exploring the topic of invisibility as it relates to their own lived experience. Students combined self-reflective writing with the ideas and various processes employed by the nine emerging artists in Apparently Invisible: Selections Spring 2009 to make drawings and collages. City-As-School eleventh- and twelfth-grade students created drawings inspired by Sun Xun’s meditations on transience and the passage of time. Taking Xun’s films Shock of Time and Lie of the Magician as a starting point, the students considered the role of propaganda and the historical contrast of Western (U.S.) and Eastern (Chinese) cultures to make drawings and texts. These drawings and writings were transferred and filmed to create a 60-frame short film.
