Calder in Tapestry — Woven Movement
This season, Galerie Hadjer presents Calder in Tapestry — Woven Movement, an exhibition dedicated to a rare and ambitious body of works by Alexander Calder: his Aubusson tapestries woven by the historic Manufacture Pinton.
Bringing together eight important tapestries conceived after Calder’s compositions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the exhibition explores the artist’s enduring fascination with movement, balance, rhythm, and colour through the medium of textile. Far from being simple translations of his gouaches or mobiles, these woven works reveal a new material dimension to Calder’s visual language — one where line acquires density, colour gains warmth, and abstraction becomes architectural.
At the heart of the exhibition are two iconic models from 1971: Green Ball and Les Masques, both presented in the landmark exhibition Calder’s Universe at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1976. These museum-level tapestries stand among the most celebrated textile works associated with Calder’s oeuvre and embody the artist’s unique ability to transform pure abstraction into dynamic spatial compositions.
The exhibition further includes a carefully curated ensemble of major Aubusson tapestries: Ice Rink, Lines of Flow, Lézards et Têtards, Disques Noirs, Sphère et Spirale, and Beaucoup de rouge et de noir. Together, these works reveal the extraordinary dialogue between Calder’s vocabulary of floating forms and the ancestral savoir-faire of Aubusson weaving.
As art historian Jean Lipman once observed, Calder considered tapestry to be even more complex than painting or gouache, fascinated by the technical and chromatic challenges involved in translating his compositions into woven form. Through the mastery of the Pinton workshops, Calder’s visual universe was transformed into richly textured surfaces where movement appears suspended within the weave itself.
More than an exhibition of tapestries, Calder in Tapestry — Woven Movement invites viewers to rediscover Calder through the lens of materiality and craftsmanship. Between modern art and decorative art, between monumentality and intimacy, these works occupy a singular place within twentieth-century creation — embodying the moment where avant-garde abstraction met the timeless tradition of Aubusson tapestry.
