Configuration

Painted in 1926, Configuration is an elegant and playful semi-abstract relief whose composition was made largely 'according to the laws of chance'. This element of Arp's aesthetic relates strongly to the automatism advocated by the Surrealists with whom Arp was closely associated during the early 1930s. However, whereas the Surrealists perceived 'chance' as the manifestation of man's unconscious will, for Arp, who had been one of the first artists to incorporate 'the law' of chance into his work during the Dada period in Zurich, it reflected the underlying law of nature. Arp was always interested in organic form, and his close association with the Surrealists in the late 1920s and early 1930s encouraged him to develop a new informality with regard to a conscious disposition of the forms of his reliefs.

In Configuration, Arp has employed this informality to express the fluidity of the continuous transformations that one finds in nature and which he believed formed part of the immutable order of the cosmos. Arp attempts to express in visual form the law that unifies all natural processes and at the same time show that the same basic laws are fundamental to the process of artistic creation. 'Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mothers womb', he asserted. 'I believe that nature is not in opposition to art. Art is of natural origin and is sublimated and spritualised through the sublimation of man' (Arp, 'On My Way', 1948, cited in Arp, Collected French Writings, Poems, Esays, Memories, Zurich, 1963, p. 241).