Calder

From October 23, 2009 to February 14, 2010 for the first time in Rome a major one-man exhibition featuring works by Alexander Calder will be held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.

His famous Mobiles and Stabiles, wire sculptures, gouaches, drawings and oil painting will be presented in an exhibition exploring the fundamental stages of the artist’s creative cycle, organised by Alexander S.C. Rower, Chairman of the Calder Foundation in New York, with the Terra Foundation for American Art and sponsored by BNL and Lottomatica.

"Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion” explained Alexander Calder in an interview for the “New York World Telegram” in 1932 presenting his Mobiles, the most significant expressive innovation of the modern era. In these sculptures, which were to become enormously popular, the artist harmonically fused shape, colour and movement into an essential whole, which he himself saw as a "universe" where "each element can move, shift and oscillate back and forth in a changing relationship with each of the other elements".

Alexander Calder (Lawton, Philadelphia 1898- New York 1976), second child of a sculptor and a painter, first began to create toys and jewellery at the age of 8. An artistic genius who also majored in engineering, he is acknowledged as one of the most revolutionary artists of the 20th century.

The exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni will document Calder’s entire creative cycle through a selection of his most important works along with some aspects of his work less known to the general public. The exhibition will open with figurative early works including oil paintings, gouaches and wire sculptures to continue with bronze figures produced in the 1930s, the discovery of Abstract art and the invention of Mobiles and Stabiles.

The early years, marked by long periods in Paris and firm friendships with Léger, Duchamp, Miró, Mondrian and other representatives of the Avant-Garde movement, will be explored through masterpieces such as Romulus and Remus from the Whitney Museum (a very significant presence in Rome!), Hercules and Lion and Circus Scene, wire sculptures in which the artist experiments with the first forms in motion in a playful, ironical dimension.