Twenty-five years separate them, but Jean Arp and François Stahly both found in sculpture a unique language. One that allowed them to materialize their visions of the artist's role in the grand harmony of nature.

 

For the first time, the fondation arp is dedicating
its new exhibition to the dialogue between two great masters who placed nature at the heart of their sculpture, through some fifty works, documents, and photographs.

How can we bring together two personalities around
a theme as vast—and yet central to the history of art—
as that of nature? What paths lead them together?
Where do their perspectives diverge? The exhibition
will not aim to compare them, but rather to foster
a dialogue between these two poets of sculpture
on several subjects.

 

The exhibition will begin by exploring how Arp (1886-1966), and later Stahly (1911-2006), found a highly organic image in the observation of nature. Plants, shoots, and torsos grow and respond to one another, always maintaining randomness and the living as the basis of the artists' expression. In a dialogue of hollows and curves, their works are animated by a biomorphic breath.

 

One section will be devoted to the freedom each artist granted themselves to reinvent nature. Instead of conforming to its lines, it is their perspectives that impose themselves upon it, giving certain fountains, forests,
or plant elements a more pronounced character for each artist, thus revealing points of difference between Arp
and Stahly.

 

The following chapter of the exhibition will highlight how each artist was ultimately able to give nature
an architectural silhouette. New ideas, whose lines
are much more structured, allow abstraction of this kind
to develop in a more geometric way, marking a distinct difference between their works.

 

 

Curators: Mirela Ionesco, Chiara Jaeger,

and Sébastien Tardy