ALEXANDER CALDER

Starting in the late 1920s, Calder served as a vital bridge between European Modernism and the nascent American avant-garde. He was a contemporary of Marcel Duchamp, who famously coined the term ‘mobile’ to describe Calder’s kinetic works (a pun on the French word, which means both ‘motion’ and ‘motive’). Calder’s continuously evolving approach to sculpture and diverse visual vocabularies led him to international acclaim in the post-WWII milieu, fundamentally altering the history of art and establishing a legacy that continues to influence a wide range of contemporary artists around the world.

The exhibition at Kukje Gallery will focus on how gesture and intuition underlie the artist’s mastery of movement. This primacy is well established in the unexpected yet graceful turns of Calder’s mobiles, which expanded the purview of sculpture—activating not only their environments but also the air that they float in. Many exhibitions have explored this effect in relation to choreography, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s Calder: Hypermobility in 2018. The show’s curators described his works as having ‘an embedded performativity that is reflected in their idiosyncratic motions and the perceptual responses they provoke.’

Installed in Kukje Gallery’s K3 space, Calder’s mobiles and standing mobiles are arranged to showcase the distinctive character and profound spatial dynamics that power them. This performativity can be seen to stunning affect in such standing mobiles as the sound-making _Untitled _(c. 1940) and the small-scale Grand Piano, Red (1946), as well as the sweeping arc of hanging mobiles including Untitled (c. 1954) and White Ordinary (1976). Their ability to capture energy can be likened to geology and time, and perhaps more evocatively, weather. The monumental _Guava _(1955) evokes a full sky of brilliant colors cutting through space. The way the mobiles pick up and amplify atmospheric changes are central to their magical transformation of the gallery. This sensitivity to attraction and repulsion, power and grace, is also perfectly embodied in the three superlative bronzes shown together here, The Flower, Fawn, and Whip Snake (all 1944).

This same attention to invisible elements can also be seen powerfully in K2 where the ink and gouache works establish a powerful resonance with Calder’s sculptural practice, a process that sees the artist working out ideas and experimenting with spatial configurations. The vibrant black calligraphic lines in Untitled (1963), recurring spirals in Blue Eye, Red Eye (1969), and natural forms in _Yellow Flower, Red Blossoms _(1974) expand on this dialogue. Taking it even further, Calder’s lines in The Bottle (1975) suggest the seismic waves that underlie the landscape.

The gouaches and sculptural works installed through K2 and K3 together create a kind of symbiotic concert involving something like a call and response. The works on paper function like an accompaniment, assisting the viewer in understanding the unseen complexities of the mobiles and how they inhabit and transform the gallery space.