Alexander Calder

Fascinated with play and movement, Alexander Calder is best known for his sculptures made at the peak of American Abstraction. A friend of artists such as Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Pierre Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, Calder’s sculptures and drawings have shaped both abstract installation and kinetic art by making abstract art move. First inspired by the circus while working as a news illustrator in New York, his works on paper and early sculpture were focused on capturing the energy and vibrancy found within the red and white tents. Bringing this theme into his sculpture, he coined the ‘mobile’, which has inherent movement, and the ‘stabile’, which engages the viewer’s motion around the artwork to create dynamic movement in still objects. 

The first retrospective of Calder’s work was held in 1938 in Springfield, Massachusetts, since then his work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art (USA), SFMoMA (USA), the Phillips Collection (USA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (USA), the Iwaki City Art Museum (Japan), the Museum of Modern Art (Japan), The Museum of Art (Japan), Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum (Japan), Nagoya City Art Museum (Japan), the Guggenheim Museum (Spain), LACMA (USA), Rijksmuseum (Netherlands), Museo Jumex (Mexico), and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (USA), among others. Calder died in 1976.