This exhibition spans half a century of creation, from the late 1920s and the first staging of the artist’s Cirque Calder performances that captivated the Parisian avant-garde, to the monumental sculptures that redefined public art in the 1960s and 1970s. At the Fondation, Calder’s mobiles – floating within Frank Gehry’s architecture – transform the exhibition into a choreographed dance.
One of the most important exhibitions ever dedicated to Alexander Calder, “Calder. Rêver en Equilibre” has been conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, its principal lender. The display also features loans from international institutions and leading private collectors, bringing together nearly 300 works: stabiles and mobiles – to use the Calderian terminology for static and kinetic abstractions – as well as wire portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings, and even jewelry, designed as unique sculptures. Throughout the chronological journey spanning more than 3,000 m2, the exhibition will highlight Calder’s fundamental artistic concerns: movement above all, but also light, reflection, humble materials, sound, the ephemeral, gravity, performance, and the interplay of positive and negative space.
The anniversary exhibition is enriched by contributions from Calder’s contemporaries. Works by the artist’s friends Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, will situate Calder’s radical inventiveness within the avant-garde movement. 34 photographs taken by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century – Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Irving Penn, and Agnès Varda, among others – will show an artist walking a tightrope between art and life. “Calder. Rêver en Equilibre” will also feature focused presentations dedicated to key bodies of Calder’s work, including his beloved Constellation series and his dynamic jewelry.
In line with previous monographic exhibitions dedicated to major 20th and 21st century figures – such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Perriand, Mark Rothko, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter – the Fondation Louis Vuitton is dedicating all of its exhibition spaces, and for the first time its adjoining lawn, to Calder’s work. In doing so, the exhibition initiates a dialogue between Calder’s volumes, planes and movements and those of Frank Gehry’s architecture.