Calder Foundation announces 2013 calder prize laureate Darren Bader
We are pleased to announce that the 2013 Calder Prize will be awarded to American artist Darren Bader. The Prize honors Bader’s innovative and unconventional use of materials, pushing the boundaries of sculpture and activating environments with unexpected pairings and phenomenological experiences. Whether the work is living, decomposing, or collapsing, the artist elicits the viewer’s response through lyrical absurdity, often compelling in the audience an instinctive desire to intervene. Bader appropriates film, music, text, digital images, and found objects, creating complicated hierarchies of cultural production that mine the intersection between the real and the fictive, and frequently employ double-entendres and wordplay.
The Calder Prize, in the amount of $50,000, honors contemporary artists who have completed exemplary work early in their careers and whose work can be interpreted as a continuation of Calder’s legacy. In addition to the cash prize, the recipient benefits from a residency at the Atelier Calder and the placement of a signature work in a major public collection.
Calder Foundation presents, They might well have been remnants of the boat
On 11 May 2013, the Calder Foundation will present its third annual one-day exhibition and performance event aiming to create a platform for dialogue between contemporary and historical practices.
They might well have been remnants of the boat, a direct quote from Calder’s description of a 1942 commission for which he used aluminum cut from his handmade boat, takes as its point of departure Calder's intuitive dismissal of traditional artistic materials and practices. His choices intrinsically confronted conventional hierarchies—particularly aesthetic, but also socio-political.
Featuring works ranging from Calder’s Tree (1941) and the live projection performance BATTLE: “Horizontal Vertigo–A propos Public Square” by Elka Krajewska vs. “Record Projection” by John Williams to Abigail Child’s recycled cinema film Dark Dark (2001) and the music of Anti-Pop Consortium, Remnants explores the use of materials that come readily to hand, a trend now ubiquitous throughout contemporary practices.
The curating is open form and gives precedence to components of real-time experience with continuously running presentations of sound and music, film, performances, and installations.
Artists include: Anti-Pop Consortium, Martin Arnold, Darren Bader, Huma Bhabha, Alexander Calder, Abigail Child, Bruce Conner, Chris Corsano, Abigail DeVille, Diagram A, Jack Goldstein, Stephanie Goto, Alejandro Guzman, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Corin Hewitt, Sheila Hicks, Denah Johnston, Elka Krajewska and John Williams, Alexi Kukuljevic, Matthias Müller, Robert Nelson, Neptune, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Luther Price, Keith Rowe, Kurt Schwitters, Gedi Sibony, Shinique Smith, Martin Soto Climent, Chick Strand, Christine Sun Kim, Leslie Thornton, and Vertical Foliage Orchestra.
For more information and a schedule of programming, visit www.calder.org/remnants.
The Independent's Charles Darwent on Alexander Calder: The man who put the 'post' into modern
Walk into the big, white, downstairs gallery at Pace and you will experience the emotion that Calders commonly make us feel: "happiness" is probably as good a word as any. Slowly, though, you realise that there is something more going on, and something less.
The mobiles aren't mobile. Or not very. Stand in front of Blue Feather or Scarlet Digitals waiting for them to move and you'll find yourself sighing. Come back 10 minutes later, though, and nothing is where you left it. As with Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, which is almost never struck by lightning, the power is in the potential.
What we are left imagining is the whole space a Calder would need to occupy if it did move, or if we could see it moving; a volume made all the more solid by being ethereal. Blue Feather and the like define mass by its absence. They look like cheery little critters – red crabs, blue cockerels, scorpions – but looking like things isn't really their point. As the man who wrote the catalogue essay for the Paris show pointed out, Calder's mobiles "signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves". The man's name was Jean-Paul Sartre.
Louisa's 43rd Birthday Present, 1948
"Calder After the War" featured in the Financial Times
...Now Pace returns to the fray with what promises to be one of this year’s most exhilarating exhibitions, Calder After the War, a museum-quality show of several dozen mobiles, stabiles and standing sculptures, plus paintings demonstrating the development of Alexander Calder’s imagery and ideas....
Read the full article here.
Marc Glimcher and Alexander S. C. Rower discuss Calder at Pace London
On 19 April, Pace London will host a discussion between Marc Glimcher, President of Pace, and Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder Foundation President and Alexander Calder's grandson, about the exhibition Calder After the War. A screening of Herbert Matter's landmark short films of Calder at work in the 1940s will follow the talk.
Friday, 19 April 2013, 2.30 to 3.30 p.m. Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, Senate Rooms, on the first floor.
RSVP is essential, as space is limited. Please RSVP by April 18 to rsvp1@pacegallery.com.
"Calder After the War" At Pace London
The Pace Gallery is honored to present Calder After the War, a comprehensive exhibition of nearly fifty works of art from the years of 1945 to 1949, widely considered to be the most important period in the artist’s career. The exhibition will be on view at Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens from 19 April to 7 June 2013.
It was in 1945, when supplies of sheet aluminum returned to their previous abundance and, more importantly, the allies claimed victory, that Calder returned to his central focus: mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles. James Johnson Sweeney, chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who had organized Calder’s retrospective in that institution in 1943, later noted:“1945 saw him once more working sheet metal, wire and wood as he had for so many previous years, but now with a new grace and a fresh treatment of pierced planes made to swim lazily horizontal. At the same time, Calder’s stabiles took on a greater complexity of interpenetrating geometrical forms. Now the pierced elements helped to a new lyrical effect.”
Calder After the War, presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, demonstrates the artist’s visionary engagement with form, color, gesture, and complexity in the four years that followed. The works of this period are distinguished not only by the grace and balance of their systems, but by the intricacy, unpredictability, and interacting forces that brought the work to a radical new level, as Calder merged stabile and mobile constructions and introduced sophisticated weights and cantilevers.
Calder and Lipman: A Friendship
by Alexander S. C. Rower
Of the legions of friends, scholars and artists who celebrated my grandfather Alexander Calder and his work in his later years, few had greater dedication than Jean Lipman, the forward-looking editor of Art in America from 1940 to 1970. Together with her husband, Howard Lipman, she contributed to Calder's legacy with camaraderie and devotion.
Read the article in Art in America.
Calder by Matter
Photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter, a close friend of Alexander Calder, had the privilege of photographing the artist’s sculptures at different stages of their realization and capturing Calder at work in his studios and in his Roxbury, Connecticut, home. Calder by Matter offers a new perspective on the sculptor’s life and work, presenting over 300 photographs of the artist and his family, many of which are previously unpublished.
Available in a Standard Edition as well as a Collector’s Edition (limited edition of 250 copies), Calder by Matter includes original essays by esteemed art critic and Calder biographer Jed Perl, Calder Foundation President and Calder grandson Alexander S. C. Rower (editor of the volume), and Matter student and colleague John T. Hill (designer of the volume).
On the occasion of the book launch, Cahiers d’Art will present an exhibition of over thirty works by Calder, including mobiles, stabiles, bronzes, decorative objects, and gouaches, as well as a selection of photographs by Matter.
Exhibition on view at Cahiers d'Art, 14 - 15 rue du Dragon, 75006 Paris, until 18 May 2013.
For more information on Calder by Matter, visit: http://cahiersdart.fr/books/calder-by-matter.
Tour the exhibition on France 5:
Extended Legacies: Joachim Pissarro in conversation with Alexander S. C. Rower
On the occasion of "Calder: The Complete Bronzes" at Mnuchin Gallery, Pissarro and Rower discuss Calder's modeled forms in plaster and bronze, a little-known but integral part of the artist's oeuvre. The two consider their commonalities as descendants of renowned artists, whose legacies they continue to explore and reinterpret through the depth of a lifetime of study.
Read the transcript in The Brooklyn Rail.
Wooden Bottle with Hairs, 1943.
Roberta Smith reviews "American Legends: Calder to O'Keeffe" in the New York Times
...The mini-survey of Alexander Calder’s career — 18 works from 1926 to 1956 — includes his popular “Circus,” but deconstructed. Its scenes of toylike performers, animal tamers and animals are laid out one at a time on a series of shelves, and are easier to see. This increased visual access plays down their cuteness and brings out their reckless sculptural inventiveness. Also on view is Calder’s vivacious "Wooden Bottle With Hairs” of 1943, one of the wittiest sculptures ever made...
Read the full article here.
