Biomorphism

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Biomorphism (from the Greek bios, "life", and morphē, "form") refers to the use, in art, architecture and design, of forms that recall living organisms: cells, amoebas, bones, seeds, water-smoothed pebbles, leaves. It is not about copying nature realistically, as the flowers and dragonflies of Art Nouveau did, but about evoking it through abstract forms, soft, rounded, without corners or straight lines.

A name for modern sculpture

The term was coined in 1935 by the English writer Geoffrey Grigson and taken up the following year by Alfred H. Barr, director of MoMA, for the major exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936). Barr distinguished two paths of abstract art: a geometric one, leading to Constructivism and De Stijl, and an organic one, linked to Surrealism. The biomorphic artists par excellence are Jean Arp, with his smooth, rounded sculptures, Joan Miró, with his floating figures, the English sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and painters such as Yves Tanguy. Moore kept in his studio a collection of bones, pebbles, shells and driftwood, from which he drew inspiration for his reclining figures.

Biomorphism comes home

From the 1930s these forms moved from sculpture to objects. In America Gilbert Rohde, the designer who brought modernism to Herman Miller, designed tables and desks with biomorphic forms, considered the first such furniture manufactured in the United States. In Finland Alvar Aalto designed his famous vases with their wavy outline and his bent-wood furniture. The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who in the 1940s made biomorphic sculptures under the influence of Surrealism, created the Noguchi table for Herman Miller, in production since 1947: a glass top resting on two wooden elements that interlock like a sculpture.

The 1950s

After the war biomorphism became the language of an era. Bean- or palette-shaped coffee tables, kidney-shaped pools, fabrics with cell and molecule motifs and fluid ceramics filled homes. Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen moulded enveloping shells in plywood and fibreglass: Saarinen's Womb chair (1948) evokes the mother's body in its very name. Arne Jacobsen designed the Egg chair in 1959 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. In architecture Saarinen's TWA terminal at New York's airport, inspired by a bird's wing, brought organic forms to the scale of a building.

Then and now

Biomorphism is a close relative of Organic design, with one difference: organic design looks at the way nature builds, biomorphism above all at how it looks. Its forms have returned several times, with the plastics of the 1960s and with digital design, which today makes it possible to generate fluid surfaces on a computer. Often, though, the influence of nature is more discreet: objects do not imitate a precise form, but keep only a few traits of it, a curve, a softness, that remind us of it.