Calder Foundation awards 2013 Calder Prize to Darren Bader
We are pleased to announce that the 2013 Calder Prize was awarded to American artist Darren Bader at a ceremony at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on 28 May 2013. The Prize honors Bader’s innovative and unconventional use of materials, that pushes the boundaries of sculpture and activates 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 employs 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. Past laureates are Tara Donovan, 2005; Zilvinas Kempinas, 2007; Tomás Saraceno, 2009; and Rachel Harrison, 2011.
Calder / Prouvé
The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof....What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.
--Alexander Calder
My creative process imposes from the outset a formative idea that is rigorously realisable. The formative idea is, above all, the understanding of an ensemble as a whole.
--Jean Prouve
Gagosian Paris, in collaboration with Galerie Patrick Seguin, is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Alexander Calder and by Jean Prouvé.
Calder and Prouvé met in the early 1950s. They corresponded regularly between Calder's frequent trips to Paris, exchanging ideas on architecture and sculpture. In 1958, Calder collaborated with Prouvé to construct the steel base of La Spirale, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris. Calder later gave Prouvé two mobiles--as well as a gouache with a dedication.
"Calder l Prouvé," installed in the lofty spaces of Gagosian Le Bourget, evokes comparisons in the broad, expressive range of production using new technologies that the close friends and collaborators evinced in their parallel practices as artist and designer. Considered together, these works testify to the fruitful exchange between two giants of Modernism in its most utopian aspirations.
Calder Foundation and Cahiers d'Art Celebrate the launch of Calder by Matter
THEY MIGHT WELL HAVE BEEN REMNANTS OF THE BOAT
The annual Calder Foundation one-day event has come and gone, but we couldn't be more pleased with how They might well have been remnants of the boat turned out!
Held in Highine Hotel in NYC on 11 May 2013, Remnants included an electryfying list of artists whose practice explores the use of materials that come readily to hand, following in the footsteps of Calder and his intuitive dismissal of traditional artistic materials and practices.
Read the Artinfo review and watch the slideshow here.
Tour the exhibition on our YouTube channel:
Calder at Cahiers d'Art extended
Cahiers d'Art and the Calder Foundation are delighted to announce that Calder will be extended until 20 July 2013!
Make sure to see the exhibition before it closes at Cahiers d'Art, 14 - 15 rue du Dragon, 75006 Paris.
Calder at the Castle
Pace Gallery is pleased to present Calder at the Castle, the first-ever outdoor exhibition of monumental works by Alexander Calder in England, at Sudeley Castle. The exhibition will be on view from 24 June to 26 October 2013.
Calder at the Castle will feature six monumental sculptures installed in the Castle’s garden, and is made possible with the collaboration of the Calder Foundation.
Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, GL54 5JD, 24 June - 26 October 2013
Marc Glimcher and Alexander S. C. Rower discuss Calder at Pace London
On 19 April 2013, Pace London hosted 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 followed the talk.
Watch films by Herbert Matter dicussed herein at:http://calder.org/life/historic-films
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.
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.
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.
