An Unprecedented Exhibition at Ben Brown Gathers Calder’s Cantilevers for the First Time

Sometimes, unexpected findings and collectors’ rediscoveries reveal new facets of an artist’s practice, particularly when they lead to carefully curated exhibitions. This is exemplified in “Calder: Extreme Cantilever,” unveiled during Frieze Week at Ben Brown London, where three of Calder’s cantilever sculptures were gathered together for the first time. In collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the gallery’s exhibition showcases these rarely seen works alongside a selection of oil paintings, works on paper and historically significant artifacts that resonate with them. Together, they illuminate Calder’s evolving formal and conceptual approach to spatial abstraction during the global upheaval of the Second World War: a cacophony of synthetic formal elements, an economy of form and materials and a striking interplay of mass, fragility, tension and harmony.

On loan from the Calder Foundation and prestigious private collections, Calder’s three standing mobiles—Extreme Cantilever and More Extreme Cantilever, both from 1949, and Extrême porte à faux III—demonstrate how the artist’s work evolved after the war, embracing irregularly shaped and seemingly precarious materials that nonetheless communicated resilience. His materials reflect the shifting landscape of the postwar world, paralleling the tensile strength and stability found in modern architectural cantilevers. Varying in size and scale, each sculpture features massive triangular black forms juxtaposed with delicate, thin wire arms that support or unfurl fragile mobiles, resembling floral blooms. Calder stated in 1943 that to him, “the most important thing in the composition is disparity.” Through the exaggerated lightness and fragility of their components, these sculptures evoke a precarious imbalance, appearing as if they might either topple or soar to become powerful metaphors for an era defined by both the anxieties of wartime and the thrill of technological innovation.

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The entire exhibition was driven by recent rediscoveries and restorations, which allowed for the reintegration of the original mobile part of Extreme Cantilever (1949), the first of the series, and the display of the original arm of More Extreme Cantilever (1949), which was much more ephemeral and recovered material based, than the elegant longer one Calder substituted it with later in his career before his exhibition at Tate in 1962. The original rod was last seen at Calder’s exhibition at MIT in 1951.

Notably, the show marks the first time the Cantilevers have been reunited and displayed together since 1949 and the first time Extreme Cantilever (1949) has been exhibited in its entirety with its original mobile since the 1950s. The third in the series, Extrême porte à faux III (1969), reflects Calder’s enduring impulse to revisit and reinvent his work, creating a continuity of forms within his dynamic visual language. This piece, conceived for his major retrospective at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, underscores the significance of cantilevers in Calder’s artistic journey. Together, the three sculptures resemble fragile yet resilient beings, like plant trunks bending but enduring under the weight of historical turmoil—futuristic, almost alien presences that, with their aerodynamic forms, project themselves into the future.

Similar shapes and formal rhythms reappear in several vibrant oil paintings featured in “Extreme Cantilever.” These works are part of a selection that accompanied the Cantilevers when they first debuted at Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin in New York in November of 1949. While some paintings lean toward the oneiric and imaginative, verging on Surrealism and echoing the generative musicality and floating forms of Miró or symbolically referencing works like Magritte’s pipe or dadaist collages, others evoke the silhouettes and tension systems animating the Cantilevers. This interplay reflects the continuous dialogue between organic and mechanical forms that inspired them. Quasars and stars—drawn from sea and sky—emerge within nebulous landscapes of pure gradients and atmospheres, where protean particles float as part of a universe still in its magmatic genesis. A strikingly monochrome piece, Cockscomb (1949), depicts a form resembling both a shell and a gear, revealing Calder’s intriguing afterthoughts as he covered vibrant colors with white brushstrokes, though hints of color still emerge beneath.

Nearby, Helmet deepens Calder’s exploration of the modern mechanical and industrial world. Here, Calder embraces a style closer to the American realism of the 1930s and its celebration of industrial progress, though he retains a timeless, almost classical suspension between time, space, nature, and artifice. Adding to the sculptural rarities in the show, Black II (1949) exemplifies Calder’s mastery of composing in air and space through color and form. This standing mobile embodies a delicate balance of opposing forces: the robust red arcs and fragile mobile elements in black, yellow and blue are held in a tenuous harmony, poised as if in a rhythmic dance, ready to respond to a mere breath or touch.

The exhibition also displays nine original drawings, many made in the same year as Extreme Cantilever, that provide additional insights into Calder’s practice. These drawings illuminate Calder’s process and the importance he attributed to graphic design in tracing and envisioning these systems of formal tensions on paper, elegantly translating those lines into materials and “drawing” three-dimensional figures in space. An iPad situated on the desk at the gallery’s entrance allows one to further explore Calder’s visual language further. Here, gallery visitors can see the sketches used to identify the sculptures in the original checklist of the Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin’s show: a few synthetic black elements and empty and full black forms create compositions of movements.

Characterized by extreme rigor, the exhibition stands as one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime projects a gallery can offer, delivering unique and previously unexplored insights into an artist’s work at a pivotal moment in its evolution. It captures the period when Calder began integrating the traditionally two-dimensional qualities of drawing—line and plane—into the three-dimensional realm, fundamentally reshaping the concepts of motion, form, and space in sculpture. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, “Calder: Extreme Cantilever,” which provides a deeper dive into these newly rediscovered transformational phases of Calder’s practice. It includes insightful contributions from Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation and Calder’s grandson, along with Ann Coxon, curator of international art at Tate Modern.

“Calder: Extreme Cantilever” is on view at Ben Brown in London through November 22.