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Calder Mobile — Cover

About Calder Mobile

Calder cut shapes from sheet metal, painted them matte, and hung them from bare wire so the air would do the rest. Duchamp called them mobiles in 1932. Nothing is centred: every weight hangs at an unequal distance from one pivot, and the whole thing still rests.

So this system treats the white wall as structure, not emptiness. Shapes are flat fills with a cut edge. Rules are hairline wire. Shadows are hard-edged plates sitting at a distance from the object that casts them, because that travelling shadow on plaster was always part of the work.

Learn more about the Calder Mobile style

Origin
Paris, France and Roxbury, Connecticut, United States
Era
1931–1932 Paris (first mobiles, Galerie Vignon, February 1932); vocabulary carried into the 1960s–70s stabiles
Key figures
Alexander Calder · Marcel Duchamp · Jean Arp · Piet Mondrian
Movements
kinetic sculpture · Abstraction-Création · Neo-Plasticism

Calder Mobile design spec

Colors

Background
Surface
Primary
Secondary
Accent
Text

Typography

JostHeadings
IBM Plex MonoMono
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