Emma Kunz (1892 to 1963) was a Swiss healer, researcher and artist.
Work No. 003 by Emma Kunz Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
Emma discovered her gifts for telepathy, prophecy and healing at an early age. She began to use her gifts at the age of 18, around the same time as she began drawing in exercise books.
Work No. 004 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
The drawings were intended to be visions of energy fields from which she could formulate diagnoses for the patients who began to visit her, seeking help for physical and mental ailments as her reputation as a psychic and healer spread.
From about 1938, when she was in her mid-forties, Emma began making the first large-scale drawings which she continued to produce for the rest of her life.
Work No. 011 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
She used a process she called ‘radiesthesia’. She would address a question to her divining pendulum and then record the way it swung, started and stopped onto large squares of graph paper. In this way she then converted the pendulum’s motions into meticulously worked-out and coloured-in geometric shapes, in which she discovered the answer to the original question she had posed.
Emma used mostly graphite and colour pencils, working intensely and continuously on each drawing for up to 24 hours. The lines of colouring-in are clearly visible in many of the works, much like the colouring-in of children in junior school.
She didn’t give any of the drawings titles, or date them, or go on record attributing any particular meaning to them. The numbers they now bear were attributed to them by art scholars after her death.
Work No. 012 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
The drawings were never displayed in Emma’s lifetime, indeed it is not certain that she regarded them as art works in the traditional way at all, but continued to think of them as tools to help with healing.
Geometric abstraction became a means for structuring and visualising her philosophical and scientific research which was not only rooted to her own times and the pursuit of her own restorative practices, but also for the future.
A selection of the drawings was only exhibited in her native Switzerland in 1973, some five years after her death.
This exhibition, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, is the first show devoted solely to Emma Kunz’s drawings to be held in the UK. It features over 60 of these calming, absorbing and intriguing works.
Work No. 013 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
Interpretation
Emma considered the works an integral part of her approach to healing, and as emblems of her holistic worldview. As she explained:
Everything happens according to a certain regularity which I sense inside me and which never lets me rest.
The Serpentine curators agree with this spiritual interpretation. In their words:
Systematic yet expansive in their compositions, her ‘energy-field’ drawings simultaneously contain micro and macro perspectives of nature, chiming with current discourses on ecology, as well as a desire to forge meaningful connections with our environment.
AION A
Emma earned her living as a naturopath but also thought of herself as an explorer and experimenter with natural healing techniques. She made investigations into the healing properties of all manner of natural materials. She used her pendulum on the flowers in her garden which, as a result, bore unusual multiple flowerheads where single flowerheads would have been expected.
In 1941 Emma discovered in a grotto in the old Roman Quarry outside the Swiss town of Würenlos a marvellous healing rock. She gave it the name AION A. The word aion comes from the Greek and means ‘without limitation’.
Emma first demonstrated the healing power of AION A on a patient of hers, Anton C. Meier, who was seriously ill with infantile paralysis. After treatment with AION A Meier recovered, a cure Emma attributed to the rock’s ‘accumulated biodynamic energy’.
45 years later the Emma Kunz Centre was opened at the self-same Roman quarries in Würenlos. Patients can visit the centre to discover more about its healing practices and undergo cures. In 1991 a museum was opened to showcase some of Emma’s 400 drawings.
View of the Emma Kunz Centre in Würenlos, Switzerland
AION A, mined from the same quarry, is still sold in pharmacies in Switzerland and is used to treat a host of health issues from joint and muscular pain to inflammatory skin disorders.
I was surprised to find chunks of the rock, in attractive yellow boxes, on sale in the Serpentine Gallery shop, as well as a spray which also, apparently, captures AION A’s healing properties.
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Christodoulos Panayiotou (b.1978) is a contemporary artist hailing originally from Cyprus.
He has collaborated on a number of projects and installations at the Serpentine, and he had a major creative say in the design and hang of this exhibition.
For the most part the approach has been to hang the drawings sequentially on the Serpentine Gallery’s plain white walls. Each one exists in its own space, giving you plenty of scope to study and examine it.
But the plain, one-picture-at-a-time approach gives way in the gallery’s enormous central room to a completely different design. Here around 25 of the drawings have been piled up on the walls to create powerfully cumulative impression.
After spending some time in this big room, looking at individual works then stepping back to survey each wall as a composition, it struck me that this big, white space has the feel of a chapel. The arrangement of the works is loosely analogous to the altar of a baroque or orthodox church, packed with holy images climbing vertically up the wall and framed to left and right by secondary images of saints and apostles. Not directly similar, maybe – but that’s the kind of feel which the images, the peace and the air of reverence encourage: a mood of quiet devotion.
Installation view of Emma Kunz at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo by the author
Arguably Panayiotou’s main contribution to the exhibition is the stone benches. See the bench in the photo above (on the lower right)? It was shaped from stone from the AION A quarry in Switzerland. It is made from AION A. It has healing powers.
It was Panayiotou’s ideas to have these benches carved and located around the exhibition. Each of the gallery’s rooms has a bench in it. The gallery encourages you to sit on them and, while you are feasting your eyes and resting your soul looking at Emma’s hypnotic drawings, to let the AION A do its healing work on your body.
Variety
I found the single most impressive thing about the drawings was their variety.
A generic verbal description – geometric shapes on graph paper, decorated with coloured pencils – doesn’t do them any justice. In the flesh they display an impressive variety not only of design and pattern, but of resulting visual effect.
Work No. 307 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
Some look like spirograph diagrams and please the part of the mind which likes simple, abstract patterns. Others are highly detailed mathematical diagrams which reward close attention to the way the shapes have been worked out to their logical conclusions.
Some feature what appear to be stylised human bodies – one appeared to contain a stylised man and woman, another contains about ten human forms reduced to geometric outlines and caught in a fiendishly complex web of lines.
Others contain uncanny optical illusions, drawing you into the depths of what part of your mind insists are only two-dimensional artefacts.
And all this is just to comment on the shapes, before you consider the colours, which are themselves very varied. Some contain plain washes, others more subtle gradations of colour; some are almost bereft of colour, others feel super colour-saturated. For me the variety of coloration was as surprising as the variety of pattern, and both were endlessly fascinating.
Conclusion
Whether Emma Kunz was a great spiritual healer, a true naturopath, and did make a significant contribution to human health by discovering AION A, I leave for others to decide.
But there’s no doubting that these lovely works, whatever the precise motivation to create them, are wonderfully attractive, calming, fascinating, varied and inspiring.
Emma Kunz at her working table, Waldstatt, 1958. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum
Related links
- Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings continues at the Serpentine Gallery until 9 September 2018
- Emma Kunz Centre website
Books & Boots 
feminineclub
/ March 24, 2019In the past, Emma Kunz s work has been shown alongside Hilma af Klint, who was presented at the Serpentine in 2016, Georgiana Houghton and Agnes Martin, all of whom share her preoccupation with spirituality and forms of abstraction. This survey exhibition is a timely review of Kunz s work which is underpinned by her belief in a holistic worldview. Systematic yet expansive in their compositions, her energy-field drawings simultaneously contain micro and macro perspectives of nature, chiming with current discourses on ecology, as well as a desire to forge meaningful connections with our environment.