Pace Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its new global headquarters in Chelsea, New York, with a major exhibition tracing the breadth of Alexander Calder’s innovative practice, leading up to his conception of the mobile in 1931—an unprecedented form of kinetic sculpture that radically altered the trajectory of modern art.

Working in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, New York, Pace will present approximately seventy works, spanning the 1920s to the 1960s, that delineate the history of the mobile as it has never been shown before. Organized chronologically, the exhibition examines defining moments in Calder’s oeuvre, from his gestural animal sketches of 1925 and three-dimensional wire sculptures made in the late 1920s, to his abstract oil paintings of October 1930 and the first truly kinetic sculptures created in the early 1930s. The exhibition takes its name from Calder’s first hanging mobile, Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/33), installed among key examples of the medium from the ensuing decades. Calder: Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere will be on view from September 14 to October 26, 2019, during which time various sculptures in the exhibition will be activated for the public on a schedule.

I try to put all of the elements in motion in my mobile sculptures. It is a matter of harmonizing these movements, thus arriving at a new possibility of beauty.

(Alexander Calder)

Alexander Calder is one of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of the twentieth century. He is renowned for his invention of wire sculpture—coined by critics as "drawings in space"—and the mobile, a kinetic sculpture of suspended abstract elements whose actual movement creates ever-changing compositions. Calder’s stabiles, which suggest implied rather than actual movement, similarly transform their surrounding space and the experience of the viewer. Calder also devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted sheets of steel, many of which stand in public plazas in cities throughout the world. Pace Gallery has worked closely with the Calder estate since 1984.