Konstruktion Nr. 5

The Swiss artist Sophie Taueber-Arp created a very diverse oeuvre, working not only in the fine arts but also in applied arts and in textiles, interior design, and stage design. Removing the borders between the different genres and creatively connecting art, design, handicrafts, and everyday life was also Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s goal as a teacher at Zurich School of Applied Arts. Taeuber-Arp designed the relief Construction No.5 in 1942, a year before she died suddenly in an accident. This work is typical of her formal idioms, with simple overlapping geometrical elements, like the circle, square or lozenge, here produced in irregular fragments of colored bronze. Together positive and negative shapes lead to a clear and harmonious unity. As early as 1916, the artist was painting her “vertical-horizontal compositions,” completely abstract works that are among the very first concrete or constructivist artworks in modernism. Taeuber-Arp’s husband, Dadaist Hans Arp, who she met in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, said: “It was Sophie Taeuber who showed me the right way, the path to beauty, with the example of her clear works and her clear life. In this world, above and below, light and dark, eternity and transience all stand in perfect balance.”