ART
Alexander Calder |
Written 30 January |
Thursday 19 March, 11:00Centre Pompidou, 75004 [map]
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry and jewelry, and designed carpets. He is well known in France thanks to his large mobiles whose coloured antennae decorate our towns and parks.
The start of the exhibition, dedicated to the early years of the work of Calder in Paris (1926-1933) explores the sources of this « engineer art », notably in the origin of his first masterpiece, the Circus. The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures
Duchamp would ultimately dub as "mobiles". He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys.
Thanks to numerous exhibited works, set to movement with the help of films and of archive footage, today’s visitors can discover the magic of the artist’s animated creations and his vivid portraits, inspired by the stars and artists of the time. The exhibition also highlights the other creative period of Calder who, in 1930, after a visit to
Mondrian’s workshop, moved definitively towards abstraction.
| What: | Alexander Calder |
| When: | Thursday 19 March, 11:00 |
| Where: | Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou 75004 [map] |
| Transport: | Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville, Châtelet-Les Halles |
| Cost: | 8-12EUR |
| Phone: | 01 44 78 12 33 |
| Web: | www.centrepompidou.fr |
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