Calder
Sculpting Time
05.05.2024 - 06.10.2024
LAC
Piazza Bernardino Luini 6,
6900 Lugano
Opening hours:
Tue / Wed / Fri: 11 am – 6 pm
Thurs: 11 am – 8 pm
Sat / Sun / Public Holidays: 10 am – 6 pm
Mon: closed
Calder. Sculpting Time explores the profound and transformative impact of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists through a focused lens. Alexander Calder (1898–1976) changed the way we perceive and interact with sculpture by introducing the fourth dimension of time into art with his legendary mobiles—a term coined by Marcel Duchamp that refers to both “motion” and “motive” in French—and by exploring volumes and voids in his stabiles, christened by Jean Arp for his stationary objects.
The exhibition includes over thirty masterworks made between the 1930s and 1960—Calder’s most innovative, prolific years—from his early abstractions or sphériques to a magnificent selection of mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles of various scales. Sculpting Time also features a large body of Calder’s constellations, a term proposed by Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney for the artist's beloved objects made from wood and wire in 1943, a time when sheet metal was in short supply due to World War II.
Curated by Carmen Giménez and Ana Mingot Comenge
The exhibition has been made possible thanks to Fondazione Favorita.
Alexander Calder (b. 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania–d. 1976, New York City), whose illustrious career spanned much of the twentieth century, is the most acclaimed and influential sculptor of our time. Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, Calder utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. He began in the 1920s by developing a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting wire, he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. From the 1950s onward, Calder increasingly devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted steel plate. Today, these stately titans grace public plazas in cities throughout the world.
Cover image:
© 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York