Alexander Calder: Calder. Sculpting Time

Until October 6, MASI Lugano presents Calder: Sculpting Time, the first comprehensive monographic exhibition in a Swiss public institution devoted to Alexander Calder in nearly fifty years. By introducing movement to the static art form of sculpture, Calder extended the medium beyond the visual into the temporal dimension. Drawing from major international public and private collections—including a large body of works loaned from the Calder Foundation, New York—Calder: Sculpting Time features over 30 of the artist's masterpieces created between 1931 and 1960. 

Calder: Sculpting Time at MASI explores the profound and transformative impact of this revolutionary artist, delineating his development of a formal and sculptural language characterized by unprecedented innovation during the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibition, designed as an open plan without walls, offers the public the opportunity to see works that span Calder’s early abstractions or sphériquest a magnificent selection of later mobiles, stabiles and standing mobiles of various sizes. Also on view will be a large body of constellations—a term proposed by Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney for the artist’s sculptures made of wood and wire in 1943. 

Calder ensconced himself in the Parisian avant-garde shortly after moving to the French capital in 1926, when he was in his late twenties. It was during this time that he began creating his path- breaking performance work “Cirque Calder” and expanded upon his invention of radically massless wire portraits. In 1930, the artist’s work dramatically shifted to the abstract. The exhibition marks this important juncture in the artist’s production with Calder’s earliest nonobjective sculptures, which he described as densités, sphériques, arcsand mouvements arrêtés. In the catalogue for the artist’s 1931 exhibition at Galerie Percier in Paris, Fernand Léger wrote: “It’s serious without seeming to be.” Prominent among these works is the stabile Croisière, in which fine wires trace a curvilinear volume to which two small spheres painted black and white are connected. Calder’s wire lines present action without mass and sculpt volumes out of voids. 

One of Calder’s most important innovations was the incorporation of movement into his compositions, thereby introducing the dimension of time. His mobiles—a term coined by Duchamp to describe these works—are kinetic sculptures whose ever-changing compositions are activated by their environments. The exhibition in Lugano features one of Calder’s most important hanging mobiles, “Eucalyptus” (1940). The sculpture made its debut in Calder’s 1940 exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and was later included in almost every major exhibition staged during the artist’s lifetime. In the words of the curators, “moving freely and interacting with its surroundings, it seems to shape the air; it is constantly changing, playing with time.” 

The exhibition also includes hanging mobiles such as Arc of Petals (1941) and the large-scale Red Lily Pads (1956), which is displayed in the last room close to a large window that offers a striking view over the lake and surrounding landscape. These works respond to the slightest change in air and light, vibrating in the unpredictability of time and its various moments. “Calder took the unique step of creating metal organisms that possess the qualities of lightness and variety, in subtle biomorphic forms, and that are at the same time tough and fragile, dynamic and esthetic, firm and hypersensitive,” the exhibition’s curators explain. Also on view, Calder’s stabiles—a term coined by Jean Arp for the artist’s static works in response to Duchamp—instead explore implied movement. Untitled (c. 1940) and Funghi Neri (1957) show the spectacular shifts in scale in these works, from the miniature to the monumental.