Theater of Encounters, an exhibition of approximately sixty artworks by Alexander Calder (USA, 1898 - 1976), spans six creative decades of the artist’s life and presents the diversity of his work, revealing his multifaceted approach as an artist. Constituting an extensive panorama, the show is a testament to Calder’s enduring contemporaneity and the importance of his artistic contributions.
Calder is known as the inventor of the “mobile,” a type of suspended sculpture made of sheet metal and wire that captures movement in an ever-changing series of forms, offering radical alternatives to the language of abstraction and existing concepts of art; he is also renowned for his “stabiles,” static sculptures with implied movement. From his mobiles of the 1930s to his monumental stabiles of the 1970s, Calder profoundly impacted the history of twentieth-century art.
Curated by Sandra Antelo-Suárez, the exhibition explores Calder’s work through a series of curatorial ‘propositions,’ in which visitors experience the ‘continuous becoming’ of the works of art in relational and emotionally energetic ways. Rather than relying on the firm chronology or thematic constructs around which exhibitions are typically organized, Antelo-Suárez invites visitors to explore the work from unconventional lenses: the metaphyical, the social-conceptual, or through what she terms ‘uncertainty and explosive kinetics.’ Visitors new to Calder will traverse the major themes in his work, from wire sculpture and the circus to radical abstraction, sound-mobiles, and monumental sculpture. Those already initiated to Calder’s work will find new ways of looking at and understanding it through Antelo-Suarez’s original thesis of Calder as the forebearer of Relational Aesthetics.