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Exhibition

Alexander Calder

Scaling Up
October 21, 2017–January 13, 2019
Floor 3

The second exhibition in SFMOMA’s Calder gallery, Scaling Up takes a close look at the small-scale and surprisingly tactile beginnings of the artist’s most sizable works. While best known for his hanging mobiles, Calder also created an astounding assortment of standing sculptures that delight the eye and engage the mind with dynamic contours, soaring lines, and, in some cases, moving components. With more than a dozen loans drawn from the Fisher Collection and the Calder Foundation, the exhibition introduces visitors to the multi-step methods of enlargement that Calder developed to transform handmade models into monumental sculptures. Featuring indoor and outdoor artworks from the 1950s to the 1970s, the exhibition coincides with the fiftieth anniversaries of The Kite that Never Flew (1967) and Intermediate maquette for Trois disques (1967), and includes rarely seen working models related to these and other celebrated sculptures.

Header image: Alexander Calder: Scaling Up (installation view, SFMOMA), 2017; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

Exhibition Preview

A standing metallic mobile with small red fins and a large yellow fin
A black metal sculpture of intersecting, curvilinear planes
A large, standing, black metal sculpture on a terrace with the facade of SFMOMA behind

Alexander Calder, Big Fat Banana, 1969; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection; © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alexander Calder, Maquette for Slender Ribs, 1962; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection; © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alexander Calder, Intermediate maquette for Trois disques (Three discs), 1967; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

Header image: Alexander Calder: Scaling Up (installation view, SFMOMA), 2017; photo: Katherine Du Tiel