Alexander Calder at the Fondation Beyeler and Art Basel Miami Beach

Dec 4, 2012 12:22AM

At Art Basel Miami Beach, the Fondation Beyeler is pleased to present two major works by Alexander Calder, Snow Flurry (1948) and Untitled (c. 1939). The Fondation Beyeler has a special historical relationship to Calder's work, which it celebrated in May 2012 with the inauguration of its «Calder Gallery» in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, New York. Works from the Calder Foundation will be shown in a series of curated presentations at the Fondation Beyeler over the next years.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. Calder abandoned the traditional definition of the work of art as a static object, introducing the groundbreaking aesthetic elements of motion and change. His work transformed surrounding space, provoking the direct participation, and thereby individual real-time experience of the viewer for the first time in contemporary art. The opportunity for the Fondation Beyeler to present at Art Basel Miami Beach (booth C01, 6 - 9 December 2012) Calder’s Snow Flurry (1948) and Untitled (c. 1939), works that exemplify the artist's outstanding contribution to 20th-century art, amounts to a small miracle. The much celebrated and widely exhibited hanging mobile Snow Flurry comes from the artist's own collection, while the Untitled standing mobile is on public view for the first time, despite having been famously photographed by the Swiss photographer Herbert Matter outside the artist’s studio in 1940.

Calder Gallery at the Fondation Beyeler (from 25 May 2012 to 2014)

The aim of the «Calder Gallery» is to enable a permanent presence at the Fondation Beyeler of works by the major American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976). The Gallery constitutes a unique presence of the artist’s work in Europe, and has the goal of deepening understanding and furthering scholarship of his oeuvre. The project follows the Fondation Beyeler's critically acclaimed exhibition «Calder - Miró» (2004), and continues in the tradition of the «Rothko Rooms», which housed a series of installations organized in cooperation with the Rothko Estate. The first «Calder Gallery», curated by Theodora Vischer, Senior Curator at the Fondation Beyeler, is an homage to Mary Calder Rower, the artist's youngest daughter, who passed away in 2011, bequeathing more than 1,000 of her father's works to the Calder Foundation. On view are masterpieces from various periods of Calder's career, portraying the intimate lifelong relationship between father and daughter. Calder's works were regularly on view at Ernst Beyeler's gallery from the late 1950s onwards. In 1972, the gallery presented «Calder, Miró». The Beyeler Collection includes two large-scale Calders: Otto's Mobile (1952) and the monumental outdoor sculpture The Tree (1966), installed in the museum’s park (in maintenance at the moment).

Calder Foundation, New York

The Calder Foundation was established in 1987 by President Alexander S. C. Rower, the artist's grandson, and the Calder family, as a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the integrity of the life and work of Alexander Calder. The Foundation’s projects include collaborating on exhibitions and publications on Calder, organizing and maintaining the Calder archive, examining works attributed to Calder, and cataloguing the artist’s works.

Fondation Beyeler