Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024)
"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."
I.
Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.
Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother.
After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).
She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).
Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.
Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse.
Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954).
Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline.
Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.
Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the
Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave
from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.
One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness.
Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as
the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out
of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.
This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...
II.
There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part).
I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).
And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).
But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.
The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).
Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)
Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)
Notes
[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000.
[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.
