Alexander Calder Installed At St. Pancras To Celebrate The Olympics

Alexander Calder

In celebration of the 2012 Olympics New York’s Pace Gallery has opened a 9,000 square- foot gallery in London’s Mayfair. Pace London has  also installed a landmark monumental sculpture by the great twentieth-century artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) at the entrance of the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. The dynamic form will remain on view for the duration of the Olympics, through 31st December 2012.

The installation of Calder’s Tripes is the first public art project by Pace London and spotlights Pace’s expanding global network, which in addition to the new Mayfair location at 6 Burlington Gardens, also includes an existing space in Soho, four galleries in New York City and a 25,000-square-foot gallery in Beijing. Tripes (1974), created from bolted sheets of steel, stands more than nineteen feet tall and spans twelve feet.

The Calder installation at St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel echoes El Sol Rojo (The Red Sun), the artist’s commission for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, which is permanently installed outside Aztec Stadium. Measuring over 67 feet tall, El Sol Rojo is Calder’s largest monumental sculpture. Like much of Calder’s work—with which Pace has a long and rich association—Tripes and El Sol Rojo convey movement, form, flexibility, and strength.

Harry Handelsman, the award-winning property developer responsible for the restoration of the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, commented: “With its dramatic design and architecture, St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel is the perfect place to host Alexander Calder’s sculpture, Tripes—with its ideas of innovation, freedom of thought and invention.” The hotel is a notable patron of the arts with many significant artworks by both established and

emerging artists hanging on its walls. It displays work by artists including: Bridget Riley, Gerald Laing, Gary Hume, Sunok Kang, Suzy Moxhay, Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, and Polly Borland.

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and led by Marc Glimcher, Pace has been a constant, vital force in the art world and has introduced many renowned artists’ work to the public for the first time. The gallery has published nearly 350 exhibition catalogues and mounted more than 700 exhibitions, including scholarly exhibitions that have subsequently travelled to museums. In addition to exhibiting and placing art works in important public and private collections, the gallery nurtures the careers of its artists, working closely with institutions to organize exhibitions, collaborations, publications, and special projects.

With the opening of Pace’s Mayfair location on 4 October 2012, the gallery’s global network will include seven exhibition spaces worldwide: four in New York; two in London; and a 25,000-square-foot space in Beijing. Pace’s Mayfair gallery will occupy the west wing of 6 Burlington Gardens, located directly north of the Royal Academy of Art’s Burlington House. Pace’s new Royal Academy-owned location will be renovated by architect and Royal Academician Sir David Chipperfield. Led by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Pace London will extend Pace’s five-decade tradition of presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions. An exhibition pairing Mark Rothko’s dark paintings and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes will inaugurate the Mayfair gallery on 4 October, 2012 (through 17 November). The exhibition will come seven years after Sugimoto’s last gallery exhibition in London, and marks the first show of Rothko’s work in the city since 1963.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976), whose illustrious career spanned much of the 20th century, is the most acclaimed and influential sculptor of our time. Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, Calder utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. 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.

Calder devoted much of his later working years to commissions he received for public, monumental works. Some of his most important projects include: .125, a mobile for the New York Port Authority that was hung in Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport (1957); La Spirale, for UNESCO, in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); La Grande vitesse, the first public art work to

be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, a stabile for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).

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