Tate Modern pays tribute to the comprehensive oeuvre of Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Few were as versatile and iconic as Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Her Dada Heads are among the best-known works of their time, and she played a crucial role in the development of Dada performances that would become a hallmark of the movement. Taeuber-Arp was a designer, architect, and painter; she created dolls, sculptures, and, influenced by her past in contemporary dance, presented various artistic performances.

She always belonged to the avant-garde in all disciplines, her puppets for a theater play were even considered too modern and daring. All 17 of these hand-painted puppets for the play King Stag, rarely loaned out due to their fragility, are on display in this Tate Modern exhibition. Throughout her life, Taeuber-Arp resisted the notion that design was worth less than the visual arts. Her position that art and life are interconnected and that furniture design, for example, should therefore be regarded in the same way as painting, for example, was highly controversial during her lifetime.

This is probably one reason why Taeuber-Arp's abstract paintings differ from those of her contemporaries. Painters often started from the figurative and approached abstraction in a process. Taeuber-Arp transferred basic structures of textiles directly into abstract paintings, thus enriching painting with another approach to understanding the abstract. A total of more than 200 works by Taeuber-Arp are on view at Tate Modern, who was long perceived as »Jean Arp's wife« but in fact made a deserved name for herself through her groundbreaking innovations.