Jean (Hans) Arp was a founding force of Dada and one of the great inventors of modern abstraction’s “organic” language. His ethos centered on chance, play, and a mistrust of rigid systems, letting forms arise as if grown rather than designed. Across collage, relief, sculpture, and poetry, Arp stripped art down to fluid, biomorphic shapes that feel at once intimate and universal, turning the absurdity and rupture of the early 20th century into a new, tender kind of order.

Arp’s work sits at the crossroads of Dada, Surrealism, and later European abstraction, and his sculptures and reliefs are touchstones for generations of artists interested in nature-like form and anti-heroic modernism. Major holdings and frequent exhibitions can be found at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Germany, among many others. His influence shows up everywhere abstraction seeks softness without sentimentality, proof that radical art can also be quiet, funny, and deeply alive.

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