Calder/Tuttle:Tentative
Pace Gallery, Los Angeles
January 21 – February 25, 2023
Pace presents an exhibition of work by Alexander Calder, selected and installed by artist Richard Tuttle, at its Los Angeles gallery. The show, titled Calder/Tuttle: Tentative, is presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation. Brought to life through Tuttle’s vision, the exhibition focuses on Alexander Calder’s artistic output in 1939, bringing together small- and medium-scale sculptures—including a masterful untitled mobile that is being exhibited for the first time—as well as a selection of works on paper created by the artist that year.
Concurrently with the exhibition at Pace, David Kordansky Gallery in LA presents works made by Richard Tuttle as freewheeling analogies to Alexander Calder’s storied practice and the contexts in which the artist worked.
Best known for his mobiles, which transformed the modern conception of sculpture, Alexander Calder is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He was also a favorite collaborator of the greatest architects of his time, and works related to three architectural commissions from 1939 will be included in the exhibition: Calder’s six intimately scaled maquettes made to complement architect Percival Goodman’s design for the Smithsonian Gallery of Art Architectural Competition, each of which feature lively forms poised on wires extending from trapezoidal bases; the nearly seven-foot-tall stabile Sphere Pierced by Cylinders (1939), created as part of Oscar Nitzschke’s architectural proposal for the Bronx Zoo; and finally, a hanging mobile related to Calder’s commission, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), for the main stairwell of Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone’s new building for The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in New York. The latter mobile makes its public debut at Pace in LA.
Additional highlights of the Calder exhibition at Pace in LA include Gothic Construction from Scraps (1939), a standing mobile that the artist constructed from rough-hewn metal forms discarded while making other works; Black Petals (1939), a freestanding black sculpture with elongated, abstract forms situated in a diagonal formation that seems to propel itself upwards; The Tuning Fork (ca. 1939), not exhibited for the past 40 years, in which an amalgam of differently weighted forms dynamically interact in myriad ways; and Little Mobile for Table’s Edge (ca. 1939), an unusual study of precarity and balance. In the way of works on paper, which represent a lesser known but significant aspect of Calder’s practice, the show will feature five vibrant compositions that examine relationships between otherworldly forms. Imbued with a dreamlike sensibility, these works, along with one monochromatic pencil drawing that serves as a study for an untitled mobile in the show, can be understood in conversation with Calder’s sculptures—featuring spirals, discs, flourishes, and other motifs that appear elsewhere in his oeuvre.
Richard Tuttle’s approach for the show at Pace in LA focuses on Alexander Calder’s intentions for his 1939 works and the greater context in which he produced them. The sculptures and works on paper by Calder in this exhibition were all made amid the outbreak of World War II. Tuttle questions the ways that aesthetic and philosophical exchanges between Europe and the United States in this period reflect in Calder’s practice. On a formal level, Tuttle explores enactments of verticality and horizontality—as well as plays of light and shadow—in Calder’s work. Tuttle’s vision for this exhibition, which centers on the ways that space discovered in the mobiles flows into two-dimensional abstract expressionist painting, disrupts long and widely held ideas about Calder’s impact on viewers and other artists during his lifetime and since his death.
Richard Tuttle has written a poem for his concurrent exhibitions in LA:
TentativeNothing is moreindividual thantwo artists. Theworth of one ispresent behindthoughts that keep theother accustomedin dance and light.Art dies withoutart to live itslife. Old helps new.New helps old see.
Over the past six decades, Richard Tuttle has nurtured an idiosyncratic and diverse practice through which he investigates the ways in which light, scale, and systems of display flow into the world and make it better. Reveling in visual and logical quandaries, the artist has cultivated a developmental approach to art making that grows in range and inquiry with each new project. Much of Tuttle’s art defies easy categorization within any single medium, and his work is always marked by unconventional uses of beauty and poetry. At Pace in LA, Tuttle meditates on the fundamental formal elements that make up Calder’s two- and three-dimensional compositions. In the exhibition of his own work at David Kordansky Gallery, Tuttle reimagines Calder’s lyrical language of abstraction as concrete through his own distinctive, and utterly contemporary, artistic vocabulary. The show will feature a series of wall-based sculptures entitled Black Light and another group of works entitled Calder Corrected. Together, these presentations speak to the enduring presence and power of modernist abstraction in art today.
On the occasion of Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, Pace Publishing and David Kordansky Gallery produce a catalogue featuring new texts and poems by Richard Tuttle and a poem by Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation and grandson of the artist.
RICHARD TUTTLE’s (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) direct and seemingly simple deployment of objects and gestures reflects a careful attention to materials and experience. Rejecting the rationality and precision of Minimalism, Tuttle embraced a handmade quality in his invention of forms that emphasize line, shape, color, and space as central concerns. He has resisted medium-specific designations for his work, employing the term drawing to encompass what could otherwise be termed sculpture, painting, collage, installation, and assemblage. Overturning traditional constraints of material, medium, and method, Tuttle’s works sensitize viewers to their perceptions. His working process, in which one series begets the next, is united by a consistent quest to create objects that are expressions of their own totality.
ALEXANDER CALDER (b. 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania; d. 1976, New York, New York) utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. Born into a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, he began by developing a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting of wire, he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, the word mobile refers to “motion” and “motive” in French. Some of the earliest mobiles moved by motors, although these mechanics were virtually abandoned as Calder developed objects that responded to air currents, light, humidity, and human interaction. He also created stationary abstract works that Jean Arp dubbed stabiles.
From the 1950s onward, Calder turned his attention to international commissions and increasingly devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted steel plates. Some of these major commissions include .125, for the New York Port Authority in John F. Kennedy Airport (1957); Spirale, for UNESCO in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo, for the Olympics in Mexico City (1968); La Grande vitesse, which was the first public artwork to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).
Alexander Calder’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and other major art institutions around the world. Long-term installations of Calder’s monumental sculptures can be found at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunstmuseum Basel; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; and elsewhere.
Recent exhibitions dedicated to Alexander Calder’s work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A permanent exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
PACE LOS ANGELES
1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
www.pacegallery.com
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