Alexander Calder. MULTUM IN PARVO

Dominique Lévy is pleased to present Alexander Calder. MULTUM IN PARVO, an exhibition of over forty rare small-scale sculptures by an American master, installed in an environment conceived for them by the architects Santiago and Gabriel Calatrava.

Taking its title, MULTUM IN PARVO, from the Latin phrase meaning “much in little,” the exhibition explores the ways in which Alexander Calder’s most diminutive works, ranging from thumb-sized to thirty inches tall, achieve monumental impact. These sculptures often share the same physical properties as Calder’s largest stabiles and mobiles, but via the tiniest details. Presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the exhibition at Dominique Lévy casts a spotlight for the first time on the complex and often surprising relationship between scale and size in Calder’s oeuvre over a period of more than thirty years. The show includes one of his smallest sculptures from the 1950s that measures just over one inch high—a miracle of miniature.

MULTUM IN PARVO presents Calder’s small sculptures in an environment conceived by internationally admired architect Santiago Calatrava. Unfolding over the gallery’s two exhibition floors, Calatrava’s design honors the beauty and delicacy of Calder’s smaller sculptures, and seeks to bring visitors into close contact with the tiniest details and gestures that give these works their magic. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring archival material, installation photography, and original sketches by Santiago Calatrava that reveal the architectural process in response to Calder’s ideas and work. The book also includes commissioned essays by Jed Perl, art historian and author currently at work on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, and Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, as well as poems by Karl Shapiro and John Updike.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alexander Calder (1898–1976) utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, he began by developing a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting 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 both “motion” and “motive” in French. The earliest mobiles moved by a system of cranks and motors, although these mechanics were virtually abandoned as Calder developed mobiles that responded to air currents, light, humidity, and human interaction. He also created stationary abstract works that Jean Arp dubbed stabiles. Major retrospectives of Calder's work during his lifetime were held at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts (1938); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1943–44); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964–65); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1964); Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1965); Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (1969); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976–77). Calder died in New York in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight.