Bettina Pousttchi’s survey exhibition at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck presents sculptures, reliefs, ceramics, video and photographs developed over the last 20 years.
Major retrospective dedicated to the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp opens at Kunstmuseum Basel
Installation view. Photo: Julian Salinas.
BASEL
.-The Kunstmuseum Basel dedicates a major retrospective to the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (18891943), whose face will be familiar to many of her present-day compatriots thanks to her decades-long presence on the 50 Swiss Franc note. Showcasing over 250 works, the exhibition Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Living Abstraction, which is produced in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, introduces broad international audiences to the interdisciplinary and exceptionally multifaceted oeuvre of this long-neglected pioneer of abstraction and establish her as one of the great avant-gardists of classic modernism.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp s Composition à cercles et demi-cercles (1938) Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck
When Sophie Taeuber took to a Zurich stage in 1917 (long before marrying Jean Arp and, as per Swiss custom, tacking his name onto the end of hers), the Cabaret Voltaire and Dada founder Hugo Ball sat in the audience and watched her dance. He saw a goldfish, darkness, questions, a child, an angel, invention, caprice, wit. “Sophie Taeuber,” he later wrote, “is completely different”.
The major survey
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstractions, which opens this week at the Kunstmuseum Basel, is dedicated to the miraculously unfixable career heralded by that performance. The exhibition will travel to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the autumn the Swiss artist’s first US survey in 40 years by way of London’s Tate Modern in July. The latter will be a first ever for the British public, which, save for a couple of works on paper in the Vic