UNICA ZURN "Drawings from the 1960s"

Attention New York friends: I just learned that Unica Zurn, the amazingly talented and underknown Surrealist visual artist/ writer who used to be Hans Bellmer's lover, has a show now at Ubu, which is located near the base of the 59th Street Bridge. The show is up for another 12 days. I love the Ubu Gallery (they had a museum-level Brauner show there a year or two ago that slayed me), and the two times I've seen Unica's work in person it was a total aesthetic-gasm. One of those times, at that big exhibit of Ahmet Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi's collections at the Guggenheim, they had a notebook of Unica's under glass open to one page and I wanted soooo badly to see the other works! (Alas, and stuff.) There's a PDF of the full exhibition catalog here, FYI.

These "automatic" drawings are her best work -- it's so loopy and mystical and assured. It's very psychedelic (she dropped mescaline with Michaux in the '50s). And it has a Minnie Evans (mediumistic)/ Scottie Wilson (the dots!) thing going on, as well as being sort of Moroccan (her pops collected art and artifacts from Africa and Asia). It's much more delicately sensual than Bellmer could ever think of being. Damn. Also, Alexander Ross has new work up at Feature.