Calder. Sculpting Time
Silvana Editoriale 2024
English, German and Italian translation of the exhibition catalogue by Scriptum
“Calder. Sculpting Time”, from 5 May to 6 October 2024 at MASI Lugano, is the most comprehensive monographic exhibition dedicated to Alexander Calder by a Swiss public institution in the last fifty years.
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) revolutionised the way we perceive and interact with sculpture by introducing the fourth dimension – time – into art. The exhibition presents his legendary mobiles – the term, coined by Marcel Duchamp, means both ‘motion’ and ‘motive’ in French – and stabiles, the stationary works so named by Jean Arp in which Calder explored volumes and voids. “Sculpting Time” includes over thirty masterpieces created between 1930 and 1960, Calder’s most innovative and prolific years, from his early abstractions or sphériques to a magnificent selection of mobiles, stabiles and standing mobiles of various sizes.
“Sculpting Time” also presents an extensive series of constellations, a term proposed by Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney to describe the artist’s beloved objects made of wood and wire in 1943, a time when metal was in short supply due to the war.