Jean Arp (Hans Arp)
Sculpture to be Lost in the Forest
(1932, cast c.1953–8)
Tate
Biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘morphe’, meaning form.
The term seems to have come into use around the 1930s to describe the imagery in the more abstract types of surrealist painting and sculpture particularly in the work of Joan Miró and Jean Arp (see automatism). Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth also produced some superb biomorphs at that time, and later so did Louise Bourgeois.
