New Alexander Calder exhibition at National Gallery Victoria
May 8, 2019
Alexander Calder is celebrated in his first Australian retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), featuring works never-before-seen in Australia, including an impressive display of Calder’s most iconic forms: suspended mobiles.
Known as the artist who made sculpture move, Calder’s radical and pioneering practice changed the course of modern art.
The Copyright Agency has worked closely with the Calder Foundation in New York to license reproductions of Calder’s work for its marketing campaign, digital strategy and merchandise.
Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor is exclusive to the NGV, and runs until 4 August. It features nearly 100 works spanning the artist’s oeuvre, ranging from early childhood sculptures to avant-garde innovations to large-scale objects from the last chapter of his career in the 1970s. Organised in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, the exhibition brings together sculpture, drawing, painting, jewellery and other media from North American art museums and private collections, including generous loans from the Calder Foundation, New York.
Calder was born in 1898 to artist parents and was encouraged to create from a young age. The exhibition includes two of his first sculptures, a tiny dog and duck cut from a brass sheet and bent into formation, presented to his parents as gifts when he was a young child.
Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor is accompanied by a dedicated workshop space for budding artists (Alexander Calder: Workshop for Kids), featuring hands-on and multimedia creative activities inspired by Calder’s works. Drawing from Calder’s interest in creating three-dimensional work, kids and families are invited to construct their own animal creatures using unique paper pop-outs and, in a specially designed digital activity, build their own virtual large-scale public artwork and place the sculpture in bespoke urban environments.
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