Hans Arp Quotes
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Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.
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All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.
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In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting. These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.
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A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.
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While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.
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Each one of these bodies art-works Arp made certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.
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I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it.
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Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.
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The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.
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It was Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.
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I like nature but not its substitutes... Mondrian opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion... Art's origins are natural.