Alexander Calder
Antennae with Red and Blue Dots
c1953
© 2015 Calder Foundation, New York and DACS, London
Largest Alexander Calder exhibition opens at Tate BBC News
‘Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture’ – Tate Modern ‘Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture’ brings together approximately 100 works to reveal how Calder turned sculpture from a static object into a continually changing work to be experienced in real time. 11 November 2015 – 3 April 2016.]]>
Source: Tate Modern
Alexander Calder initially trained as an engineer before attending painting courses at the Arts Students League in New York. He travelled to Paris in the 1920s where he developed his wire sculptures and by 1931 had invented the mobile, a term first coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe Calder’s motorised objects. The exhibition traces the evolution of his distinct vocabulary – from his initial years captivating the artistic bohemia of inter-war Paris, to his later life spent between the towns of Roxbury in Connecticut and Sachéin France.
The exhibition also features the figurative wire portraits Calder created of other artists including Joan Miró 1930 and Fernand Léger c.1930, alongside depictions of characters related to the circus, the cabaret and other mass spectacles of popular entertainment, including “Two Acrobats”, 1929, “The Brass Family”, 1929 and “Aztec Josephine Baker”, c.1929. Following a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in 1930,where he was impressed with the environment-as-installation, Calder created abstract, three-dimensional, kinetic forms and suspended vividly coloured shapes in front of panels or within frames hung on the wall. “Red Panel”, 1936, “White Panel”, 1936 and “Snake and the Cross”, 1936, exemplify the artist’s continuous experimentation with forms in space and the potential for movement to inspire new sculptural possibilities. They are shown together with a selection of other panels and open frames for the first time, illustrating this important moment in Calder’s development.
The exhibition includes a selection of his most significant motorised mobiles. “Black Frame”, 1934 and “A Universe”, 1934, reveal the ways in which Calder made use of his training as an engineer and his fascination with the dynamism of the cosmos. By 1932, Calder’s suspended sculptures would begin to move without motors, animated by just the lightest of air currents. In “Snow Flurry I”, 1948, Calder demonstrates his masterful expertise in constructing large-scale mobiles whose equilibrium and reduced palette awards them their sublime quality.
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Alexander Calder at the gardens of the Rijksmuseum (exhibition, 2014)
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