Unica Zürn... Portrait of Hans Bellmer 1965

The staging of gesture, in a processus of transformation and metamorphosis, the patient weaving of memories, through "chinks in line": Unica Zurn has probably succeeded in her project of BEING. All the while waiting for her "magical encounter" - with the white-hair man, with Death?

" When i was a child i dreamt/ about the marriage with a white-hair man paralysed./ tied to a wheel chair forever.../ Behind us, eternal./ blossomed the Jasmine/ And this is the meaning of my legend/ of life together.../ Since my chilhood wedding, in a white dress-/ I feel that I gradually become white.../ To swim into the White, to perceive finally/ the White Image?"

 from an essay by Barbara Safarova "The magical encounter between writing and image"

Hans Bellmer .. print for Unica Zurns Dark Spring

Hans Bellmer ... drawing

Hans Bellmer ... drawing

One of my favourite artists draws one of my favourite writers...

Hans Bellmer  ~ Gaston Bachelard 1957

In 1957 Bellmer executed portraits not only of Gaston Bachelard but also of other
leading artists and writers of the day, including Arp, Wilfredo Lam, Henri Michaux, Victor Brauner, Albert Camus and Jehan Mayoux. The art historian Peter Webb has written of these works that together they ‘form a marvellous pantheon of the creative people of his time’ and it seems likely that Bellmer himself saw these portraits, generally pencil or charcoal drawings, as a coherent body of works.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Gaston Bachelard

~"the pure imagination designates its projected forms as the essence of its proper fulfillment. It delights naturally in imagining, thus in changing forms. Metamorphosis thus becomes the specific function of imagination. The imagination cannot comprehend a form except by transforming it, by dynamizing its becoming, by seizing on it like a sectioning of the flux of formal causality, precisely as a physicist cannot understand a phenomenon except by grasping it in a sectioning of the flux of efficient causality."~ 

G Bachelard  LAUTREMONT

Hans Bellmer ..Unica Zürn

by Hans Bellmer

"Cephalopodie a deux" - 1955, pencil, 9 x 10 ins