Jean Arp was born in 1886 in Strasbourg, a city on the border of Germany and France. He studied in Paris and worked in Munich prior to the start of World War I. When he moved to Zurich to take advantage of Swiss neutrality, Arp became a founding member of Dada, an art movement that believed in natural and irrational order over reason. Through his affiliation with Dada, Arp experimented with chance. Arp was a talented painter and poet, but he is most remembered for his biomorphic sculptures. Chance plays a part in his sculpting process. Arp never started a sculpture with a shape in mind. Instead he allowed intuition to guide him through the sculpting process, creating sensual, biomorphic forms full of movement that are often seen as figurative, playing on the primal desire to see ourselves reflected in art. Jean Arp died in Basel in 1966.

Enrico David was born in Ancona, Italy in 1966. Discussing these recent works, David states, “I draw in the hope of illustrating the functioning of this time, and how I function within it.” Unlike Arp who ends with the human figure, David starts with the human figure. From there, artistic innovation takes over. The figures are subject to growths and protrusions; they are encapsulated in undistinguishable forms. Like Arp, sensuality is at play. Drawing on colors and figures of the Weimar artists of the early 20th century, these works draw from the early 20th century history of Berlin.

Major solo exhibitions for David include Ultra Paste, ICA London (2007); Bulbous Marauder, Seattle Art Museum (2008); How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2009); Repertorio Ornamentale, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2011); Head Gas, New Museum, New York (2011); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); The Hepworth Wakefield (2015); Fault Work, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2016); Gradations of Slow Release, MCA Chicago and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019). In 2013, David presented a major installation of paintings, tapestries and sculptures as part of The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni for the Venice Biennale. In 2019, David represented Italy as part of Neither Nor: The Challenge to the Labyrinth, curated by Milovan Farronato at the Italian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale

In 1926, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp moved to Paris, where Arp’s experimentation with Dada led him to Surrealism. He participated in several Surrealist exhibitions including the landmark Surrealist Exhibition “Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme” at the Galérie Beaux-Arts in 1938. Shown alongside artists Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Andre Masson as well as many others, Arp’s work was decidedly more abstract. In a lecture at the Nasher in 2018, Lewis Kachur, Professor of Art History at Kean University, explains the exhibition and Arp’s distinctive contribution to it, “It may be considered the most important exhibitions of the first half of the 20th century, and, as such, [it was] widely photographed and written about in the international press. The right wing French nationalist press labeled the show as disturbingly non-French because of [its inclusion of] so many foreign-born artists, while the communist press considered it a cop-out and too dream-obsessed rather than social or political. They missed what Arp was doing here. In his group of works, [there was] a subtle, yet distinct, politicized response to the widespread politicization of that moment.” Arp, an artist of both French and German descent, having already lived through World War I, seems uniquely positioned to respond to this moment right before World War II. He does so by calling on the peaceable principals of Dada, specifically nature and chance, and applying it to his abstracted work.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, proclaimed Jean Arp “a one-man laboratory for the discovery of a new form.” The biomorphic “Pistil”, named after the female reproductive part of a flower, is at once sensual and primal. This unique work was made from cast cement in 1950 for a friend of the artist and fellow Dadaist, Georges Hugnet. 

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“We do not wish to copy nature,” Arp explains. “We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce. We want to produce directly and without meditation. As there is not the least trace of abstraction in this art, we will call it concrete art.”

Enrico David began working with cast jesmonite in 2014 and has continued to use this unconventional material for his sculptures to this day. “They have a very particular relationship to drawing for me,” the artist explained recently in an interview with Stéphan Aquin, chief curator of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “They’re white, but then they’re covered; I put this slight layer of graphite on where I want the drawing to come across -- to emerge -- which then brings [the sculptures] back to some form of drawing.”

The artist describes these works as “appearing to be ridden with incompleteness: not fully formed — perhaps in order to narrow down the possibility of them being chanced upon by peril, or so burdened with detail that peril itself might just be put off and look elsewhere: displaced cavities, exposed networks of nerves, limbs, eyelashes, sculptural mass made lighter in places by subtraction. In the case of these sculptures this passage can be conceived as being simultaneously delicate and brutal, accommodating and defensive. Between these conditions there is simply a surge in which visibilities are assembled.”

In 2018, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC organized Enrico David: Gradations of Slow Release, the artist’s first US museum survey. Curated by Michael Darling and featuring sculptures, paintings, textiles and works on paper, the exhibition travelled in 2019 to the Hirshhorn. “Tools and Toys III” was included in this exhibition, as well as in a 2015 exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield. This is the last available cast of the work.

The palette of bright blues against the white cloth and the figure's recumbent pose recalls Matisse's famous "Nu bleu" lithograph series from 1952, which could further be seen as a nod to Waltraud's profession as a dancer and her suffering from a fatal illness, which Matisse was facing at the time he created this late work.

Like a mother, she guards two small children playing with a toy plane, while in the background we can see a plane in approach heading towards them, possibly a reference to a bombing raid. Dresden, the artist's hometown, was heavily bombed in February of 1945 shortly before the end of the war, when A.R. Penck was just six years old.

The difference in scale of the figures suggests a moment in the past: a childhood memory of loss and destruction, while at the same time showing kids innocently playing war, perhaps unwittingly emulating that bygone reality of the artist's childhood. "Traudel" in repose, with her finger pointing at the event, becomes a gatekeeper of the past as well as a manifestation of the present, a synonym for mother nature and the cycle of life. It is arguably one of the most personal paintings by the artist depicting human vulnerability, and a poetic testament to his love.