ALEXANDER CALDER

Emerging in 1920s Paris, Calder was a disruptor who challenged established boundaries in art by collapsing mass and setting sculpture in motion. In 1931, he pioneered an entirely new type of art with his invention of the mobile, or kinetic abstract compositions, which continue to influence generations of artists today. Composing Motion explores how movement remained central to Calder’s oeuvre throughout his career not only in his kinetic sculptures, but also in his stabiles, or stationary objects, and his paintings. The show draws its title drawn from a 1933 statement in which Calder asserted, “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”

Ordered and unpredictable, random and controlled, sparse and full, Calder’s work embraces these contradictions, as is evidenced by Le Petit croissant (1963), a 4 ½-foot-wide hanging mobile consisting of red-and black-painted sheet metal and wire. When animated, the metal elements oscillate on their wire axes. The work exemplifies how Calder’s artistic language is articulated, both in stillness and in flux. Combining physical forces–gravity, motion, and balance–with aesthetic intuitions, Calder’s mobiles come to life with subtle changes in the environment, undulating in response to air currents in a way that activates the surrounding space.

Whereas Calder’s mobiles continuously carve new forms by way of their movement, it is the anticipation and suggestion of motion that figure into the artist’s stationary works. Even when motion is not literally present, it is implied through Calder’s compositions. In the artist’s works on paper from the 1960s and 1970s, of which there are fifteen in Composing Motion, vividly colored circular forms fill the two-dimensional plane. Red, yellow, blue, and black spheres circulate throughout an untitled work on paper from 1963, as if the dynamic energies of his mobiles were translated directly to paper. A stabile such as The Wave (maquette) (1966) embodies both stasis and flux, its curled ends giving a sensation of motion. This work is the original model for a monumental counterpart that stands over eight feet tall. Although it is intimate in scale, it implies immensities, with an unpainted surface reflecting light and energy.

Calder: Composing Motion will be accompanied by a hard-cover catalogue featuring an essay by art historian and Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Robert Slifkin.