SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP

Sophie Taeuber-Arp is one of the most important artists of the 20th-century avant-garde. Dismantling conventional oppositions between Dada and geometric abstraction, fine art and utilitarian objects, ‘La règle des courbes’ shows how Taeuber-Arp boldly engaged with the cultural context of international modernism. 

The title of the exhibition refers both to a rule as an organising principle and to an instrument used to measure lengths and distances like a ruler. The works display Taeuber-Arp’s exploration of the curve, what it can measure and how it can calibrate the space between work and world. Rather than consider her abstract language as self-referential and cut off from the world, Taeuber-Arp developed a formal lexicon that spoke to the world and was of its environment, leaving a body of work that invites us to rethink the driving impulses of early abstraction and that still resonates today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual publication, ‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp: La règle des courbes / The Rule of Curves,’ from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring new critical texts by Briony Fer and Jenny Nachtigall that shed new light on Taeuber-Arp’s artistic output.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.