Alexander Calder: Gouaches. Gagosian Gallery, New York
© 2014 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Gagosian Gallery presents a broad collection of watercolours by the artist Alexander Calder (Pennsylvania 1898, New York 1976) in New York. He studied mechanical engineering and in 1923 enrolled in an art school.
The collection, which has been split between the Madison Avenue gallery and Gagosian’s space on Davies Street, London, is an explosion of colour in which the 58 pieces on display contain Calder’s restricted palette: white, black or bright primary colours.
«ALEXANDER CALDER: Gouaches». © 2014 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Alexander Calder is known for his mobiles, christened thus by Marcel Duchamp and consisting of a sculptural artistic technique based on bent and twisted wires with brass plates that trace figures in space and are driven by an electric motor or a crank. The stationary works were named stables by Jean Arp. These works in motion made him a precursor of kinetic art. During his long stay in Aix-en-Provence in 1953, and at the same time as he was pursuing this sculptural practice, he began to paint these watercolours, which he would go on making throughout his life.
Motifs such as spirals, arabesque ornaments, pyramids drawn from Egypt or red suns from his impressions of Guatemala, among others, appear as an evocation of the subconscious.
«ALEXANDER CALDER: Gouaches». © 2014 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Mike Bruce
«What I produce is not precisely what I have in mind, but a sort of sketch, a man-made approximation. That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential…as long as they have something else in theirs.» Alexander Calder.
