La enfermedad como médium. Aproximación a los dibujos de Unica Zürn

Abstract

In looking at a field where surrealism, informalism and outsider art all intersect, we offer a hermeneutic proposal dealing with the complexity of the drawn work of Unica Zürn, starting with its status as an “artistic object”. The fact that the creation of her disturbing drawings coincided with her continued confinement in psychiatric hospitals from the 1950s onwards makes it hard to avoid assessing how the schizophrenia she was diagnosed with impacted on his work. Moving on from these considerations, in the second part of this article we turn to phenomenology, in particular to the proposals made during those years by her friend Gaston Bachelard, and to the formulation of the figural by Jean-François Lyotard, by attempting to bring together interpretative tools that maintain the singularity of these images in terms of an irreducibility to the temptations that sought to interpret them in a pathological manner.