Born in the small Swiss village of Brittnau, Emma Kunz had an intuition talent for sensing the laws of nature and was able to cure people that modern medicine had given up on, using a method called dowsing (a technique employing a pendulum to find things that can’t be seen, such as underground water or ore veins) and medicinal herbs.
　In addition to thus being a healer and a researcher of medicinal herbs and minerals, Kunz was also an artist who left an oeuvre of some 400 drawings. Executed in lead or color pencil and crayon on sheets of graph paper of roughly one-meter square, her mysterious drawings employed geometrical shapes in compositions where telepathy and mathematics seem to merge without contradiction.
　Kunz created these pictures to record her understanding of the world and the laws of the universe. Never having been formally trained in art and never having sought remuneration or praise from others for her works, Kunz’s creations were the pure products of her pictorial inspirations. For that reason, her creative oeuvre might be called outsider art. However, since the 1970s her works have often been exhibited in museums of Europe and North America as exceptional products of creativity that transcended the bounds of conventional artistic expression.
　In this exhibition, 19 drawings of Emma Kunz (including 2 reproduced as prints) are being shown in Japan for the first time with the cooperation of the Emma Kunz Center in Switzerland.

　What appear at first glance to be partially deflated plastic balloons are actually glass globes blown by Venetian glass artisans and then shaped by artist Hiromi Masuda while still hot and flexile into distorted shapes. When placed in the garden, Masuda’s glass globes reflect sunlight with the appearance of a playful spray of soap bubbles.

Hiromi Masuda PLAY THE GLASS, free-blown glass
Collection of the artist
※Photo shows a previous work. On display in this exhibition will be a new work from 2009.

The grandeur of Buddhist paintings, the uniquely Japanese world expressed in woodblock prints, 19th-century British etchings, soil collected from the various regions of Japan, video compositions of computer graphics generated by mathematical patterns …. These works are all chosen, regardless of genre, as vehicles that can lead us to new dimensions of perception and understanding with subtlety and strength.
Among the contemporary art forming the largest category in this exhibition are works by artists based overseas whose works are seldom seen in Japan, such as the Dusseldorf-based artist Etsuko Watanabe who studied under Richter, and the Swiss-based Zurich Concrete school artist Shizuko Yoshikawa, who has created many public art works. In these ways, this exhibition will offer new encounters with works of art reflecting intellectual and aesthetic approaches that will surely be fresh discoveries for the visitor.

Exhibiting artists (random order)
Okyo MARUYAMA / Heihachi HASHIMOTO / Hasui KAWASE / J. M. William TURNER / John Constable /John MARTIN / Marcel Duchamp / Kenzo ONODA / Hiroshi KURODA / Yoko MATSUMOTO / José María Sicilia / Emma KUNZ / Etsuko WATANABE / Misato BAN / Takahide KOIKE / Koichi KURITA / Nakanishi NATSUYUKI / Kim Taek Sang / Shizuko YOSHIKAWA / Richard Tuttle / Osamu WATANABE / Hiromi MASUDA