Birds in the aquarium

Location: private collection.

The work relates to the post-war period and the attempts of Europe to cope with the destruction and losses. The work is a wooden relief sculpture consisting of three separate pieces of wood. The aim of the artist was to combine abstraction with images of nature. The name of the picture itself sounds paradoxical – “Birds in an aquarium”: of course, birds cannot live in an aquarium. Their heads are so unusual that they resemble fish, giving the whole work ambiguity. This is how Arp expressed the chaos of the environment.