A couple of days ago was birthday of the most influential American sculptor and artists of the 20th century, Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976.)

Originator of the mobile, a type of sculpture that uses the principle of equilibrium; Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. Although Calder’s early mobiles and stabiles were on a relatively small scale, he increasingly moved toward monumentality in his later works.

The Calder Gallery in the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) is a collaboration between the Calder Foundation and Fondation Beyeler. It’s a dedicated space in the museum, where selected works by Calder are shown. Trees Naming Abstraction is the name of the latest exhibition.

Alexander Calder transposed modernist visual abstraction to space, naming his works allusively for the aspects of motion or balance they portrayed. Leaving Paris for his native United States in 1933, he settled in an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, where nature became a new source of inspiration for his creativity. Although all the works are abstractions in space, their titles denote particular moments of motion, repetitions of form and elaborate equilibria. Abstraction becomes tangible here, as is demonstrated by two individual works that have been selected. Organic associations determine the works’ forms with, for example, the crowns of trees, cascades of branches and sequences of leaves. The free play of the many works presented in the museum’s interior space merges into a veritable “Calder Forest.”

This work is the focus of Calder Gallery II at the Fondation Beyeler from June 8, 2013 to January 12, 2014. For more info click here->