Fruits-jumeaux

Details

Rau 656. Exhibitions: Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Galerie Denise René, Paris 1962; Jean Arp – reliefs, Musée d’art et d’industrie, Saint-Etienne 1978, cat. no.35. Provenance: The artist’s estate, with two estate stamps on the reverse;Erker Galerie, St. Gallen;private collection, Southern Germany.

Description

• Typical relief by Arp made from wood and cardboard in an abstract, organic formal vocabulary
• The artist created over 800 reliefs, they were an important facet of his oeuvre
• Arp’s wood reliefs influenced the works of Henry Moore and Joan Miró When Hans Arp, as a young poet, sought a visual expression for his poems, he quickly arrived at collage via painting and drawing, influenced by the Cubist movement. At first he used various papers, but quickly found other materials and used textiles and wood. This important step into three-dimensionality led Arp to create reliefs and then wooden constructions until he gradually discovered three-dimensional sculpture. But he remained loyal to the relief throughout his life: from 1915 until his death he created over 800 such works. At the end of the 1950s, when Arp was already over seventy years old, the artist once again turned to relief. He continued to use an organic, abstract formal language that was oriented towards the change and growth of nature. The artist never wanted to imitate nature, but rather used it as a starting point for natural forms. This is how he writes about his concrete art: “We don’t want to depict, we want to depict how the plant forms its fruit.” Growing forms thus emerge in dialogue with their foundations or with the space surrounding them. There are only two clearly contrasting colours in this work: white on a light blue background. The two create an interaction, a dialogue of opposites: white and coloured, full and empty, positive and negative. These forms in connection with the ground thus describe “the longing for harmony and a state of bliss: being secure in the unity of mother nature” (Gabriele Mahn in: Die Reliefs von Hans Arp, p. 53).