![]() The studies in physics and applied kinetics will crucially effect the artist’s early experiments with mechanized constructions. The fascination with construction and industrial materials would later bring Calder to graduate in mechanical engineering. He created there his first constructions based on animal-designs. Calder's early fascination with sculpture began at the age of nine in his father's studio, where he started experimenting with mechanical devices and materials such as wire, sheet metal and wood. His father was a successful sculptor, and his mother worked as a portrait painter all her life. These monumental abstract sculptures were installed in urban spaces around the world and contributed to revamping the conversation around public sculpture in the last decades of the 20th century.Ĭalder was born in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1898 to artistic parents. The stabiles are large-scale fixed versions of the mobiles, which the artist created in his late years. In their movable nature, Calder's mobiles can be seen as an example of Kinetic art. These evolving sculptures served to Calder’s exploration of sculpture and its site of display, which led him to introduce space and movement as fundamental elements in the encounter of the audience with the work of art. The mobiles are constructions made of suspended objects that hang down from the ceiling and continuously move with the flow of air. ![]() His major contribution to the modernist redefinition of artistic media is the invention of two new categories of sculpture, called mobiles and stabiles. He created sculptures and design objects that participated in the larger tendencies of European and American avant-garde, uniquely combining abstract art, modernist principles, machine and cosmic imagery in his works. Alexander Calder redefined sculpture by introducing into it the element of movement. ![]()
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