Alexander Calder, New Old Universe, 1953

02 April 2025

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote an essay on Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures to accompany an exhibition at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. Here, he captured in a few words the American artist’s unique and ingeniously simple contribution to the history of sculpture: “it does not suggest movement but subtly conquers it.”^[1]

From ancient Greek marble carvings to the Abstract Expressionist and Informalist movements that were unfolding as Calder worked, artists had been concerned with capturing movement in static forms for centuries. Calder asked a simple question of this paradigm: why static? In his mobiles, he used a system of meticulously balanced wires and weights to create a new form of sculpture that suggested a liberated understanding of what sculpture can be. These early kinetic works were both free in a literal spatial sense — their component parts able to rotate and shift on a system of perfectly balanced axis — and free of the dogma of stasis that had previously defined art.

This series, which would come to be his best known, was catalysed by the artist’s move to Paris from New York in 1926. Here, he came into contact with important proponents of the European avant garde such as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger, all of whom in some way shaped his understanding of art.

It was his visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 that could be thought of as the true seed of his mobiles: “I thought at the time how fine it would be if everything moved,”^[2] Calder said of his visit. The following year, he created his first kinetic sculpture. Duchamp coined the name mobile, meaning motion in French. The term has since become synonymous with hanging sculptures and ornaments of all shapes, sizes and origins. Calder’s invention quickly went beyond the artworld, becoming a familiar object within wider visual culture.

New Old Universe (1953) represents the breadth of the mobiles as a body of work. It is a constellation of wooden spheres in black, white and red, designed to hang from the ceiling by a thin wire, mimicking the suspended state of the cosmos. In the planets, Calder saw a unique sense of balance and suspension that he wanted his own work to mimic: each element orbiting or being orbited by another, systematically moving both as a whole and as a cohesive system of parts. As the artist himself put it, “the underlying form in my work has been the system of the universe.”^[3]

Through his kinetic sculptures, Calder gave form to an entirely new way of thinking about how an artwork might occupy a space; how its component parts might interact with one another and the environment surrounding them. Their simple conception and meticulous execution place them among the most important artistic developments of the 20th century.

New Old Universe will be included in Opera Gallery Dubai’s forthcoming exhibition ‘Calder / Hiquily: Balancing Act’, which runs from 16 April until 04 May.