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Overturned
Blue Shoe with Two Heels Under a Black Vault
ca. 1925
Painted wood
79.3 x 104.6 x 5 cm
76.2553 PG 53
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Jean
Arp participated in Dada activities in Zurich
in the teens; during the mid-twenties he allied himself
to a certain extent with the Surrealists, sharing their
faith in unfettered creativity, their celebration of
spontaneity, and their antirational stance.
He executed his first monochrome wood reliefs in 1914,
adding the element of color two years later. Comprised
of discrete wood forms mounted individually on wood
supports, these reliefs are assembled like collages
rather than carved. By combining aspects of painting,
collage, and sculpture, the reliefs of the teens and
twenties served in some sense as a bridge to his sculpture
in the round. Arp regarded his simplified forms as emblems
of natural growth processes, and continued to make reliefs
throughout his life. According to Arp, his works carried
their own momentum and arrived at organic solutions
subject as much to the laws of chance as to his conscious
manipulations. He commented on the “ridiculous”
analogies of forms that resulted from this process;
his descriptive titles, such as that of the present
work were often correspondingly whimsical.
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