Until October 6, MASI Lugano presents Calder: Sculpting Time, the first comprehensive monographic exhibition in a Swiss public institution devoted to Alexander Calder in nearly fifty years.
As a teenager I would often mistake Alexander Calder’s work for that of Joan Miró and sometimes even Picasso. Bold, playful and abstract, the sculpture of these three art giants appeared interchangeable. Visits to Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and Musée Picasso in Paris only seemed to confirm Calder’s European influences, even though the darker elements at play in their work seemed absent from his own. Being introduced to the wire lion tamers and acrobats in his “Cirque Calder” several years ago in the lobby of New York City’s Whitney Museum, at that time in Marcel Breuer’s brutalist edifice, reinforced that European connection. It also reminded me of another: Calder’s enormous, red “Flamingo” in front of Mies Van der Rhoe’s Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago.