Calder in the Alps

14 July - 26 February 2017

Gstaad

Hauser & Wirth presents an exhibition of outdoor monumental sculptures by Alexander Calder, marking the first time this remarkable body of work has been exhibited in Switzerland. Situated against Gstaad’s dramatic mountainous landscape, the exhibition comprises a standing mobile and five stabiles from the 1960s and 1970s, which have been installed in public locations around the area. From July to September, the sculptures were situated at Lauenensee, Kirche Saanen, on the Promenade and in the grounds of Le Grand Bellevue hotel in Gstaad. The works have been relocated for a second iteration of the exhibition, and until the end of March 2017, sculptures are displayed in the gardens of Le Grand Bellevue and Alpina hotels. Calder concentrated his efforts on making outdoor sculptures on a monumental scale during the later part of his career, turning his attention to major commissions for cities, museums and universities around the world – working with renowned architects along the way. A paradigm shift in the history of twentieth-century sculpture, his large-scale works in industrial materials reveal the artist’s lifelong fascination with energy and space, creating a new relationship between object and environment. With these graceful and fluid works, Calder truly unleashed his creativity and genius for compositional balance, imbuing traditional sculptural form with a dynamism and torsion that belies its static nature. Among the works on view is ‘3 flèches blanches’ (1965), which stands out for its elegant motion as the only standing mobile on display. Exhibited for the first time in the artist’s posthumous retrospective in Turin in 1983, the seemingly delicate sculpture can hold its own, whether in front of Mies van de Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York City, where it was last installed, or alongside the dramatic rural landscape of Gstaad. ‘Tripes’ (1974) has a surprising curvaceous quality not usually associated with Calder’s monumental works. With biomorphic arms reaching out in a multitude of directions, the work radiates energy, activating the surrounding space. Calder Foundation President Alexander S. C. Rower remarks, ‘My grandfather reset the traditional relationship between volume and void with his monumental sculptures. Installed against the mountainous backdrop of Gstaad, these works will surely surprise viewers as they harmonize in unpredictable ways with their surroundings.’ Calder’s massive sculptures engage the invisible forces of gravity, air, time and chance, brought buoyantly to life through simple figures, organic shapes, and abstract elements of bolted steel plate that coalesce to form a complex interplay of interjecting forms and negative space. The presentation, realised in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, coincides with an exhibition of ‘Calder & Fischli/Weiss’ at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel.

Selected images

Untitled

1976

Tripes

1974

A Two-Faced Guy

1969

Six Planes Escarpé (left), Four Planes Escarpé (right)

1967

Six Planes Escarpé

1967

Four Planes Escarpé

1967

Four Planes Escarpé (left), Six Planes Escarpé (right)

1967

About the Artist

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was born in 1898, the second child of artist parents—his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter. In his mid-twenties, Calder moved to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League and worked at the ‘National Police Gazette,’ illustrating sporting events and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Shortly after his move to Paris in 1926, Calder created his ‘Cirque Calder’ (1926–31), a complex and unique body of art. It wasn’t long before his performances of the ‘Cirque’ captured the attention of the Parisian avant-garde.

In 1931, a significant turning point in Calder’s artistic career occurred when he created his first kinetic nonobjective sculpture and gave form to an entirely new type of art. Some of the earliest of these objects moved by motors and were dubbed ‘mobiles’ by Marcel Duchamp—in French, mobile refers to both ‘motion’ and ‘motive.’ Calder soon abandoned the mechanical aspects of these works and developed suspended mobiles that would undulate on their own with the air's currents. In response to Duchamp, Jean Arp named Calder's stationary objects ‘stabiles’ as a means of differentiating them.

Calder returned to live in the United States with his wife, Louisa, in 1933, purchasing a dilapidated farmhouse in the rural town of Roxbury, Connecticut. It was there that he made his first sculptures for the outdoors, installing large-scale standing mobiles among the rolling hills of his property. In 1943, James Johnson Sweeney and Duchamp organized a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which catapulted Calder to the forefront of the New York art world and cemented his status as one of the premier American contemporary artists.

In 1953, Calder and Louisa moved back to France, ultimately settling in the small town of Saché in the Indre-et-Loire. Calder shifted his focus to large-scale commissioned works, which would dominate his practice in the last decades of his life. These included such works as ‘Spirale’ (1958) for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and ‘Flamingo’ (1973) for Chicago’s Federal Center Plaza. Calder died at the age of seventy-eight in 1976, a few weeks after his major retrospective, ‘Calder’s Universe,’ opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.