Hauser & Wirth Examines One of the Most Under-Recognized Artists of the 20th Century
Hauser & Wirth has launched its first exhibition devoted to Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943), one of the most important yet under-recognized artists of the 20th-century avant-garde. Challenging conventional boundaries, Taeuber-Arp asserted art’s relevance to daily life, working across disciplines, from works on paper, painting, textiles, and sculpture, to design and architecture, as well as dance and performance. The 30 works in the online exhibition, dating from 1916 to 1942, are presented alongside photography and relevant material from the Arp Foundation archives.
From the earliest point in her career, Taeuber-Arp explored new abstract forms in a groundbreaking manner inspired by her arts-and-crafts education. From 1916 to 1929 she taught textile design at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, utilizing the innovative methods of color theory and abstraction she developed in her own work. In 1918 she was commissioned to design the stage sets and marionettes for a satirical version of Carlo Gozzi’s play King Stag. Constructed using a variety of wood shapes with exposed joints, the marionettes reflect Taeuber-Arp’s sensitivity for space and rhythm, likely inspired by her experience as a dancer.
From 1926, after her move with husband and fellow artist Hans Arp to Strasbourg, France, Taeuber-Arp designed radical architectural interiors. The exhibition features preparatory works surrounding her important commission for the Aubette, a cultural center in Strasbourg. Her fellow Dada proponent Emmy Hennings said of the design, “The walls, covered with paintings, give the illusion of almost endlessly vast rooms. Here painting makes the visitor dream, it awakens the depths in us.”
In 1928, Taeuber-Arp designed the home and studio she shared with her husband in Meudon, near Paris. Along with architecture loosely based on Bauhaus tenets, she created fully modular furniture with minimalist forms and colored paint. The house became a meeting place for a group of artists, writers, and intellectuals that included Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp.
The exhibition’s inclusion of Taeuber-Arp’s investigations of architecture, interiors, textiles, and furniture provide welcome nuance and texture to our understanding of the work of an influential female practitioner too long overshadowed by her husband and other mandarins of the avant garde. hauserwirth.com
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
