This week we’re celebrating the birthday of the late Sophie Taeuber-Arp (19 January 1889 – 13 January 1943), a titan of modern art and design, whose enduring influence belies her short life. The Switzerland-born artist, designer, architect, puppet-maker and dancer smashed down the boundaries between creative disciplines, combining crafts with the vocabulary of modern abstraction to magnetic effect.

Where most artists came to abstraction through a process of gradually simplifying forms, Taeuber-Arp drew on the grid structure of textiles. In the 1930s, she began a series of “multispace compositions” and “schematic compositions”, constructed on a white or black background from aligned circles, rectangles and crosses. Works such as Composition 1931 (oil and distemper on canvas) were imbued with a playfulness and a game-like quality, as if you could pick up the shapes and move them around. If only we could settle down to a game with the artist today…