Hans Arp’s Landscape or a Woman, conceived in 1962, belongs to the artist’s mature period, in which the boundaries between the human body and the natural world are deliberately dissolved. Neither entirely figurative nor wholly abstract, the sculpture suggests at once a reclining female body, a landscape and an organically evolving form.

Arp rejected the idea that sculpture should simply imitate visible reality. Instead, he sought forms that appeared to have developed according to the same principles as nature itself. His rounded, swelling volumes evoke stones polished by water, plants, fruit and fragments of the human body without resolving themselves entirely into any one of these things. Nature was not something to be copied, but a creative process to be emulated.

In Landscape or a Woman, the female body is reduced to an elemental arrangement of curves and volumes. A breast might equally suggest a hill, a hollow becomes a valley, and the reclining figure appears to merge with the earth itself. Human and geological forms become interchangeable, as though both were manifestations of the same underlying natural order.

The critic and art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker argued that his abstraction, like that of Constantin Brancusi, was not intended to be obscure or inaccessible. Rather, through the simplification of form, Arp sought a universal visual language based upon archetypal shapes that could be instinctively understood. Landscape or a Woman exemplifies this idea: despite approaching abstraction, its associations with the body and landscape remain immediately recognisable.

The plaster version of this work is in the permenant collection of the Hepworth Wakefield, UK