Private Visit and Cocktail - “The Rule of Curves” Sophie Taeuber-Arp @ Hauser & Wirth

“Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The Rule of Curves”, curated by Briony Fer, is the first solo exhibition devoted to Taeuber-Arp’s work at this gallery. Conceived as a historical exhibition structured around a clear conceptual axis, it brings together more than 45 works spanning four decades, from 1916 to 1942. Drawn from the German Arp Foundation (Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V.), as well as major private and public collections, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, gouaches, wooden reliefs and an emblematic Dada head. Briony Fer examines the formal vocabulary of the curve, which the artist used in an innovative way to stretch, bend and deform the language of geometric abstraction.

A major figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde, Taeuber-Arp challenged traditional oppositions between Dada and geometric abstraction, as well as between fine art and applied or utilitarian objects. “The Rule of Curves” reveals how she boldly engaged with the cultural context of international modernism.

The title refers both to a principle of organization and to a measuring instrument, like a graduated ruler. The works on view bear witness to her sustained exploration of the curve—what it measures, and how it structures the space between the artwork and the world. Far from conceiving her abstract language as self-referential or detached from its environment, Taeuber-Arp developed a formal vocabulary that was both shaped by and addressed to the world. Her legacy invites us to reconsider the impulses at the origins of abstraction and continues to resonate today.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication, “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: La règle des courbes / The Rule of Curves”, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, featuring new critical essays by Briony Fer and Jenny Nachtigall that offer a renewed perspective on the artist’s work.