News / Alexander Calder / Museum Exhibitions

On View

Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960

Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu

Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

The Inner Island

April 28–November 4, 2023
Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
www.fondationcarmignac.com

This exhibition, which features more than eighty works by fifty artists, presents visitors with new, unknown worlds floating outside familiar geographies and temporalities. The artists included break away from reality, bringing to life fictional, mental, and abstract islands. Work by Harold Ancart, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Simon Hantaï, Roy Lichtenstein, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool is included.

Closed

Monochrome Multitudes

September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

Revisiting classic modernist ideas about flatness, idealized form, and colors, this exhibition opens up the seemingly reductive format of the monochrome to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities while working toward a more expansive narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century art. Work by Alexander Calder, Walter De Maria, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Frank Gehry, Sally Mann, and Richard Serra is included.

Closed

Motion
Autos, Art, Architecture

April 8–September 18, 2022
Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture celebrates the artistic dimension of the automobile and links it to the parallel worlds of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film. The exhibition brings together nearly forty automobiles that are placed center stage in the galleries and surrounded by significant works of art and architecture. Work by Alexander Calder, Christo, Andreas Gursky,  Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

America. Entre rêves et réalités
La collection du Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection

June 9–September 11, 2022
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
www.mnbaq.org

Featuring more than a hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works drawn from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition, whose title translates to America. Between Dreams and Realities, offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary American art. Organized thematically, it looks carefully and critically at the notion of the American dream and uncovers how artists have variously grappled with questions of identity, the challenges of globalization, the realities of everyday life in America, and the complexities of its technological and political revolutions. Work by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Mary Weatherford is included.

March 12–June 19, 2022
Fundacíon Barrié, A Coruña, Spain
fundacionbarrie.org

This exhibition explores the history of twentieth-century art through fabrics designed by artists, with unique examples from artistic movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop art. Comprised of more than one hundred works, the show presents an important overview of weaving as a popular art form in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe. Work by Alexander Calder, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Sterling Ruby, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

Alexander Calder
Minimal/Maximal

August 22, 2021–February 13, 2022
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
www.smb.museum

This exhibition traces the unique relationship between size, scale, and spatiality in Alexander Calder’s works, while juxtaposing his organic forms with the strict geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s building in a poetic dialogue. Calder’s outdoor sculpture Têtes et queue (1965), which was originally installed at the museum’s inauguration, now returns to its terrace.

Closed

Alexander Calder
Modern from the Start

March 14, 2021–January 15, 2022
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

Alexander Calder reimagined sculpture as an experiment in space and motion, upending centuries-old notions that sculpture should be static, grounded, and dense by making artworks that often move freely and interact with their surroundings. Bringing together early wire and wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion, and monumental abstract sculptures, the exhibition takes a deep dive into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness.

Closed

Heaven and Earth
Alexander Calder and Jeff Koons

October 21, 2017–March 24, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
mcachicago.org

This exhibition brings together a selection of works from two contemporary art icons, allowing viewers to experience their sculptures in playful and unexpected ways.

Closed

Action<–>Reaction
100 Years of Kinetic Art

September 22, 2018–January 20, 2019
Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands
www.kunsthal.nl

Action<–>Reaction: 100 Years of Kinetic Art covers a wide range of kinetic art and offers visitors an opportunity to experience work that appeals to all of the senses. The exhibition is a revival of the successful 2013 Paris exhibition Dynamo. Work by Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, and Carsten Höller is included.

Closed

Hot Sun, Late Sun. Untamed Modernism

April 21–October 28, 2018
Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France
www.fondation-vincentvangogh-arles.org

This thematic exhibition explores light, understood as a metaphor illuminating the relationships between artists and the Mediterranean region, home to experimentation, modernism, and postmodernism. Work by Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso will be included.

Closed

MoMA at NGV
130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art

June 9–October 8, 2018
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

MoMA at NGV will provide a unique survey of the museum’s iconic collection. Two hundred key works will be arranged chronologically into eight thematic sections. The exhibition will trace the development of art and design from late-nineteenth-century urban and industrial transformation through to the digital and global present. Work by Alexander Calder, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol will be included.

Closed

14th Biennale de Lyon
Floating Worlds

September 20, 2017–January 7, 2018
Various locations in Lyon, France
www.biennaledelyon.com

Curator Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, reinterprets the term modern, setting it in the context of a fluid and extended modernity. The Biennale explores the legacy and reach of the concept of the modern in today’s art. Work by Davide Balula, Alexander Calder, and Lucio Fontana is included.