Emma Kunz

7 November 2026– 4 April 2027

Somerset

Dates

7 November 2026 – 4 April 2027

Location

Somerset Directions

Materials

Press Release Learning Notes

Artwork Inquiry

This fall, Hauser & Wirth Somerset presents a major solo exhibition by Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963), conceived in partnership with the Emma Kunz Foundation. The exhibition brings together a rare selection of works that unfold across multiple galleries, offering an insight into the visionary practice of an artist, researcher, poet and healer. Although Kunz did not identify as an artist during her lifetime, she is now recognized as a pioneering figure whose interdisciplinary work anticipated many contemporary concerns around spirituality, ecology and holistic systems of knowledge.

Despite beginning her large-scale geometric drawings relatively late in life, after years of working as a healer and naturopath in Switzerland, Kunz’s interest in drawing can be traced to her early school years. Employing a pendulum-guided technique known as radiesthesia, she created more than 400 geometric compositions, often developed through periods of concentrated observation lasting over a day. Rather than representing the visible world, these works served as tools for exploration, enabling Kunz to investigate underlying patterns and relationships that shaped both her research and therapeutic practice.

While Kunz’s work emerged from the landscape and healing traditions of rural Switzerland, its presentation in Somerset establishes connections with a region whose cultural identity has long been shaped by narratives of myth, pilgrimage and the enduring relationship between landscape and belief. From longstanding theories surrounding the county’s ley lines and energetic pathways, Somerset provides a resonant setting for an artist whose life’s work sought to explore unseen connections between nature and human consciousness.

Presented across the galleries, the exhibition traces this remarkable body of work through a significant group of geometric compositions executed in graphite, colored pencil and oil crayon on graph paper. Characterized by intricate structures that are at once highly precise and subtly irregular, the works reveal a visual language shaped by repetition, concentration and ritual. For Kunz, drawing was not a means of representation but a tool for inquiry, diagnosis and reflection. The exhibition comprises works of varying scale and chromatic intensity, highlighting the remarkable range of Kunz’s visual language. Selected works will be displayed on sculptural wooden bases, inviting visitors to move around and encounter them from multiple viewpoints in a manner that reflects Kunz’s own process of observation and making.

Two stone benches created by Christodoulos Panayiotou from AION A, the therapeutic mineral rock discovered by Kunz in 1942 in a Roman quarry in Würenlos, Switzerland, provide a moment for contemplation. The installation builds on the dialogue first developed through ‘Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings’ at Serpentine Galleries, London (2019), where six benches from AION A were introduced as viewing devices and a means of physically connecting visitors with a material central to Kunz’s healing practice and holistic philosophy. Here, the benches extend that encounter, inviting visitors into a closer engagement with the stone and the ideas that informed Kunz’s research.

The exhibition concludes through a sequence of intimate gallery spaces, where quieter and more pared-back works on paper encourage close looking of the subtle variations within Kunz’s practice. Together, the works on view reveal a practice rooted equally in intuitive curiosity and disciplined observation, producing images of extraordinary formal complexity and enduring relevance. The exhibition culminates with the final work Kunz completed before her death in 1963, depicting a transcendental portal illuminated in yellow, a color Kunz would regularly use at the final points of her works marking their completion. The meditative work provides a powerful conclusion to a lifelong investigation that remained remarkably consistent in vision and purpose.

Installation Views

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Emma Kunz in her studio, Waldstatt, Switzerland, 1952 – 1953. Courtesy Staatsarchiv Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Photo: Werner Schoch

About the Artist

Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) was a Swiss artist, researcher and healer whose intricate geometric drawings explore the relationship between nature, energy fields and human consciousness. Kunz considered herself first and foremost a researcher, using her drawings to investigate the underlying principles she believed governed people, nature and the wider world.

Produced using graph paper, colored pencil and a pendulum-guided method, the drawings served as tools for diagnosis, reflection and inquiry within her therapeutic practice. They enabled her to identify relationships and possible causes of illness, from which she developed paths toward healing, grounded in her understanding of the human being as an integrated whole of body, mind and spirit. The drawings were therefore both the outcome of Kunz’s research and an essential component of her healing practice. In 1953, Kunz self-published two illustrated books that expressed her desire to share her work, though she never had a chance to do so.

Emma Kunz in her garden, Waldstatt, Switzerland, 1952 – 1953. Courtesy Staatsarchiv Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Photo: Werner Schoch

Today, her legacy is preserved by the Emma Kunz Foundation and the Emma Kunz Center in Würenlos, Switzerland. The Foundation houses the largest collection of her work and supports ongoing research into her practice, while the Emma Kunz Center offers a space to engage with her work, which is presented in its museum.

Since the 1970s, Kunz’s work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions internationally, with a renewed attention to her practice in recent decades, including ‘3xAbstraction,’ at The Drawing Center, New York NY (2005), where her work was presented alongside Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin; ‘Weltempfänger: Georgiana Houghton—Hilma af Klint—Emma Kunz’ at Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany (2018); ‘Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings’ at Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019), the first major UK solo exhibition of her work; ‘Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings’ at Muzeum Susch, Susch, Switzerland (2019), further underscoring the enduring relevance of her practice; and ‘Emma Kunz Cosmos’ at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2021).