Installation video
Installation view
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Thomas Lannes
Installation view with Alexander Calder, Flying Dragon (maquette) (c. 1974)
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Thomas Lannes
Installation view
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Thomas Lannes
Installation view
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Thomas Lannes
Alexander Calder
Flying Dragon (maquette), c. 1974
Sheet metal and paint, 15 ⅜ × 25 ¼ × 11 ½ inches (39.1 × 64.1 × 29.2 cm)
© 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
Alexander Calder
Untitled, 1975
Sheet metal and wire, 31 ½ × 59 × 26 inches (80 × 149.9 × 66 cm)
© 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
Alexander Calder’s Flying Dragon (1975) in production at Segré’s Iron Works, Waterbury, Connecticut, 1975
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
Alexander Calder’s Flying Dragon (1975) in production at Segré’s Iron Works, Waterbury, Connecticut, 1975
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
Alexander Calder’s Flying Dragon (1975) at Segré’s Iron Works, Waterbury, Connecticut, 1975
Artwork © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
To mark the opening of Gagosian’s new Paris gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione, Alexander Calder’s monumental sculpture Flying Dragon (1975) will be installed in Place Vendôme as part of FIAC Hors les Murs, which presents artworks in emblematic public spaces throughout the city. The inaugural exhibition at the rue de Castiglione gallery will underscore the unique visual language of Flying Dragon, presenting diverse archival materials related to the sculpture and its original maquette alongside additional works from 1975.
Flying Dragon exemplifies the dynamism and structural ingenuity that propelled Calder’s work to become a fixture of modern art. Due to its enormous size and sturdy makeup, the nonobjective sculpture is weighty; yet its limited points of contact with the ground suggest a body in flux, about to take to the air. The work attests to Calder’s intuitive sense of scale and his ability to conjure compositional harmony from diverse formal elements. Using elegant lines, boldly reductive forms, and a restricted palette, he was able to summon an exquisite balance of weight and mass.
Calder produced two maquettes for Flying Dragon. The larger of the two is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; the smaller one, black in color, is featured in the current exhibition. On view alongside the maquette—and archival material related to Flying Dragon—are a quartet of very rare unpainted sculptures that have not been previously exhibited.
In 1975—just one year before his death—Calder was energetically engaged in multiple large-scale public projects. These included a monumental sculpture for the city of Jerusalem (Jerusalem Stabile, completed and installed in 1976); L’Araignée rouge, a commission for the Paris business district La Défense (completed and installed in 1976); and the monumental stabile that inspired this exhibition, Flying Dragon. Flying Colors, the DC-8 jet that Calder designed for Braniff International Airways in 1973, was exhibited at the Paris Air Show in May—a commission whose concept echoes the soaring forms of Flying Dragon, which was fabricated in Connecticut that summer.
Selected works by Calder will also be presented at the rue de Ponthieu gallery to further emphasize the artist’s visual vocabulary and the interplay between nature and abstraction, stillness and motion, and monumentality and ephemerality in his practice.
In this video, Gagosian director Serena Cattaneo Adorno celebrates the installation of Alexander Calder’s monumental sculpture Flying Dragon (1975) at Place Vendôme in Paris, detailing the process and importance of this ambitious project.
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