Conceived in 1962 and carved in marble, Larme de galaxie is an arresting example of Arp’s mature sculpture, displaying the formal purity and high degree of abstraction that characterises his most accomplished works. After devoting himself principally to abstract relief sculpture throughout his Dada and Surrealist years in Zurich and Paris, the 1930s saw the artist’s increased experimentation with expanded volumes of sculpture in the round. This transformation from the flat, biomorphic shapes of his earlier reliefs (fig. 1) into fully bodied sculptures would provide the artist with inspiration for the next three decades of his career (fig. 2). The basis of his artistic principles was the idea of metamorphosis as a reflection of the evolutionary and generative processes of nature itself.

The present work is anchored in a rounded mass with a triangular tip reaching toward the sky, evoking the spiralling upward movement of the milky way galaxy or perhaps the bulb of a flower or plant. The intentionally non-specific form suggests metaphorical possibilities that mirror the metamorphic, evolutionary process inherent in Arp’s work. As Eduard Trier notes: ‘Each of Arp’s sculptures contains the seed of its growth from birth. What one of them has attained in completeness or greater perfection it passes onto the next […]. All these transmutations, transitions, pupations are not definitives. The forms remain fluid. They move from the road of one meaning to another […]. This is his syntax and it has imprinted itself on our minds by its modified repetition and underlying permanence. Arp tapped a source that continually reaffirms its inexhaustibility’ (E. Trier in Jean Arp, Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, pp. xii & xiv).

Guided by chance and intuition, the organic beauty of Larme de galaxie seems to manifest from a vision unencumbered by formal restraints and thus transcend boundaries, allowing for different interpretations by each viewer. Arp observed: ‘Often some detail in one of my sculptures, a curve or a contrast that moves me, becomes the germ of a new work. I accentuate the curve or the contrast and this leads to the birth of new forms [...]. Sometimes it will take months, even years, to work out a new sculpture. I do not give up until enough of my life has flowed into its body. Each of these bodies has a definite significance, but it is only when I feel there is nothing more to change that I decide what this is, and it is only then that I give it a name’ (quoted in Herbert Read, Arp, London, 1968, p. 87). This sense of freedom, liberty and power of intuition would echo with artists such as Joan Miró (fig. 3), who similarly evoked natural forms in his painting without imitation or specific definition, as if the work of art had been created by natural forces rather than the artist’s hand. Jean Arp frequently realised his sculptures first in plaster, a medium that was highly responsive to touch and allowed an element of chance in the creative process, to then be enlarged in either stone or bronze. The present work is a unique marble carved from Cristallina marble sourced from Switzerland.