Emma Kunz

• Name — Emma Kunz • Birth Name — Emma Kunz • Website — emma-kunz.com • Movement — Abstractism • Born — 23 May 1892 • Died — 16 January 1963 • Birthplace — Brittnau, Switzerland • Place of death — Waldstatt, Switzerland • Memorials — Emma Kunz Center (Waldstatt)

Kunz was born 23 May 1892 in Brittnau, Switzerland to Stephan Oswald Kunz, a destitute hand weaver, and Rosina Kunz (née Gubelmann). Three of her siblings died during childhood and her brother and father committed suicide when she was 17 years old.

Kunz was not a trained artist; she is characterized as an outsider artist. Inspired by spiritual evolution, she divined with a pendulum and created her drawings by radiesthesia. Kunz did not intend for her works to be seen in a fine arts context; none of her works were titled or dated. Kunz instead recorded the medical meanings of her works in books. Kunz began creating large-scale drawings on graph paper with pencil, colored pencil and oil pastels starting in 1938. She considered her drawings to be holograms that could be experienced multidimensionally. In 1942 in Würenlos, Kunz discovered "AION A," a healing rock. The rock is still mined from the same place, and is sold in Switzerland. At the time of her death, Kunz had left behind a substantial body of work of 400 drawings. Kunz's first exhibition in the early 1970s, posthumously. The UK's Serpentine Gallery presented Kunz's second solo exhibition in 2019; the exhibition marked Kunz's first solo showing in the United Kingdom. For the exhibition, artist Christodoulos Panayiotou produced stone benches quarried from AION A.

• Der Fall von Emma Kunz (The Case of Emma Kunz), 1973 • 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin, Santa Monica Museum of Art (2005).. • 55th Venice Biennale, 'The Encyclopedic Palace' Central Pavilion curated by Massimiliano Gioni • Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings, Serpentine Galleries, 2019 • Emma Kunz Cosmos - A Visionary in Dialogue with Contemporary Art, Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2021