Feuille se reposant

Jean Arp (Strasbourg, Germany, 1886 – Basel, 1966)
Collection : Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC)

An immense bronze volume, which pivots, turns and dances on its axis despite its imposing size, is offered to the viewer in its entirety. Its supple contours and the alternating movement of its solids and voids invite the viewer to take a walk around it, as if to provoke, catch or freeze a leaf spinning in the wind. According to the different points of view adopted, the evocations proliferate and the images transform. The rounded curves simultaneously sketch anthropomorphic and plant-like forms: a hand, a body, a dance, a twirling fabric or a petal. With his sculpture in the round, Hans Arp established connections between heterogeneous worlds. He did not aim to reproduce existing forms, he created new ones. Inspired by nature and its life forces, the sensual curves of Feuille se reposant (Resting Leaf) seem to be the result of an inner force pushing outward.

Hans Arp first gained recognition as an artist in the late 1910s. From very early in his career, he sought to free himself from the forms of an art he considered conventional and outmoded. In 1916, he was one of the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich. Later, he got close to the Surrealists and became a member of the Cercle et Carré group, which advocated pure abstraction, and joined the Abstraction-Création group in 1931. He played with words and shapes, created collages and assemblages, and wrote poems. Hans Arp’s complex and polymorphous works are marked by hazard and humor, nature and the decompartmentalization of genres.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham  

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