Hans Arp

Hans Arp (Jean) (1886 –1966) was an abstract sculptor, painter, collagist, printmaker, and Dadaist poet of German birth who lived and worked primarily in France. Born to a German father and French Alsatian mother, Arp defied categorisation through nationality and cultivated a cosmopolitan outlook, moving fluidly between Germany, Paris and Switzerland in a career that spanned two world wars. Married to the experimental artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, he became, along with Sophie, a key figure in avant-garde groups across Europe. He was a pioneer of abstract art and a founder of Dada in Zurich, a Surrealist and a Constructivist. Sometimes described as a ‘one-artist movement’, Arp anticipated junk art and the Fluxus movement through his embrace of ephemera and the materially worthless. Arp’s abstract reliefs and sculptures exemplified the creative force of the liberated unconscious. He has remained a distinct and prominent creative figure in 20th century art through his explorations of biomorphism, his celebration of universal concepts of life, growth and transformation, which was both playful and profoundly mystical, and his unswerving surrealist belief in chance and accident.