Petit Château fort
1970
Medium
painted sheet metal and wire
Measurements
46.7 × 33.0 × 63.5 cm
Credit Line
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2015
© Calder Foundation/ARS, New York. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia
Gallery location
Contemporary Art gallery
Level 3, NGV International
About this work
Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures, constructed from tin and wire, transformed the field of modern sculpture. Calder’s mobiles developed out of his famous ‘circuses’ of animated wire figures, which were conceived in a playful spirit with a living dynamism and balance evoking music or dance. Calder’s tin mobiles possess a delicate sense of form and colour and are perhaps best seen as plastic equivalents of Joan Miró’s paintings, which Calder admired for their whimsy and grace. Conceived on a domestic scale, Petit Château fort is a standing mobile sculpture that moves with gentle kinetic force.
Artwork Details
Place/s of Execution
(Saché, France / New York, United States)
Accession Number
2015.368
Department
International Sculpture
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited