Artists who deviate from the norm are born where and when they want. What's more, they are even born twice. It has never been made clear when Alexander Calder came into the world. The mother said that on August 22. The handwritten record document swears and perjures that July 22. The year is clear: 1898. Cuba was lost, but a visionary was won.
Magazine is healthy and as June, July or August 22 are just around the corner, perhaps we should start celebrating the 125th anniversary of the sculptor's grandson Alexander Milne Calder, the sculptor's son Alexander Sterling Calder and the painter Nanette Calder.
None of them wanted young Sandy to follow in the footsteps of the saga. He graduated in technical engineering. The best thing he could have done, because that's how he revolutionized the genre, broke all the molds and made the sculpture fly and dance with its mobile structures driven by an engine or by the wind, the blizzard or the hurricane or, simply, blowing without let the room watchman see us.
Taking advantage of the anniversary, the Guntrian gallery, a space inaugurated a few months ago at Muntaner 217 and specialized in graphic work and sculpture, have organized a party with Calder as the main protagonist and very well accompanied by the cream of 20th century art in the United States . They are all who are.
The list includes Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Sol Lewitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, the dancer Keith Haring, the poetic Cy Twombly, the wonderful and less popular Gene Davis and many more.
Just as it happened with the Sonia Delaunay exhibition, the gallery space, promoted by its three Canadian collectors, remains just before so much work, which creates a very special optical effect.
Calder leads the series of works, all on paper and printed or dated from the last years of his life, such as the lithographs Star (1975), which is very remotely reminiscent of Matisse's snails, or Zebre Jaune et Zebre Noir, from 1976, which It was the year of his death and it shows an artist in complete command of his trade. Also a special sense of humor.
Spirale Imaginatif, also from 1975, is a compendium of tributes to 20th century art, to Henri Matisse, to still lifes and also to the compositions of his great friend Joan Miró. It is curious that the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, apart from several sculptures, houses one of the most poisonous works of art, if not the most, in history: the mercury fountain.
Two pieces by Sam Francis stand out at the Guntrian gallery party-show. He wouldn't have turned 125 like Calder, but he would have turned 100 rounds. The Californian artist and printmaker, master of unforgettable abstract floral compositions, was born on June 25, 1923. The day before, the Lacma museum in Los Angeles will open a respectable retrospective.
In Barcelona you can see El rojo superior, a very beautiful engraving from 1964 and a lithograph Untitled 345, from 1991 (Francis died in 1994) which, with its floral lyricism, also draws on the work of Joan Miró.
The Barcelona painter was a reference for second-generation American neo-expressionists, including Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, who starred in a pictorial paso doble with Monet this past fall at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
The party in the gallery has more incentives such as the presence of artists such as Robert Indiana, very famous for his LOVE sculptures, with one of the pieces from The Hartley Elegies, the Berlin Series, from 1990, Mark Tobey or Peter Saul who, in Actually, of all the artists present in the exhibition, he is the only one who is alive at 88 years of age and whose work is the most surprising in the entire gallery with its comedy halfway between pop art and new-style surrealism.
Some of the pieces displayed in the Guntrian Collection bear the Suite Olympic Centennial stamp. They are part of an initiative in which artists from all over the world participated -Chillida, Warhol, Nam June Paik, Rafael Canogar, Antonio López...-. They are graphic works created to celebrate the hundred years of the modern Olympic Games, whose era began in 1896.
“In the gallery we have enjoyed putting together this exhibition of great American figures of various artistic tendencies, including pop art, whose works establish the dialogue of American art of the 20th century because between them they traveled and crossed different paths”, Gunter Heinrich tells Magazine.
The exhibition will be open until June 30. Guntrian Gallery, Muntaner 217
