Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder
14.09.2019 - 26.10.2019

In close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, New York, Pace will inaugurate the 3,600-square-foot first-floor gallery with a focused exhibition dedicated to Alexander Calder. The exhibition will examine the breadth of the artist’s practice beginning in the mid-1920s and leading up to his creation in 1931 of the mobile—an unprecedented form of kinetic sculpture that created a true rupture in the trajectory of art. From his gestural Animal Sketchings and massless wire portraits of the 1920s to his abstract oil paintings of 1930 and the swift progression to motorized objects and hanging mobiles, this exhibition will capture the remarkable transition from potential to actual energy in Calder’s work and underscore his relentless pursuit of the vitality and life force in art.

Alexander Calder (b. 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania; d. 1976, New York) is one of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, a kinetic construction of suspended abstract elements that describe individual movements, moving and balancing in changing harmony. Calder also devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted sheets of steel, many of which stand in public plazas in cities throughout the world.

Calder’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including Performing Sculpture, Tate Modern, London (2016); Motion Lab, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016); Calder Monumental, Denver Botanic Gardens (2017); Hypermobility, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Scaling Up, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); Radical Inventor, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2018); and Calder-Picasso at the Musée Picasso, Paris (2019).