In a career that spanned most of the 20^th century, the engineer-turned-artist Alexander Calder studied the science of motion through art. “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions,” he once wrote. He was inspired by the universe as he imagined it, a balanced system based on the circle and the sphere.

You can see all the elegance of his universe in Alexander Calder: Monumental Sculpture at Larry Gagosian’s Rome gallery. Calder’s moving sculptures (“mobiles,” as Marcel Duchamp called them) are microcosms of masterfully balanced opposites: motion and stasis, black and white, line and shape.

The enormous elliptical room at the heart of Gagosian’s Rome space, pierced by four floor-to-ceiling windows, hosts two monumental works almost entirely in black—a mobile and a stabile. The sculptures cohabitate like animals of different species sharing a cage at the zoo, one dangling from the ceiling and the other huddled across the room.

Looking at the stabile, Spunk of the Monk (1964), one can see hidden angles within the sculpture’s smooth curves, like bones poking through the arc of a bat’s wing. This suggestive articulation allows the viewer to find movement in a sculpture that doesn’t actually move. Walk around it in circles and you will witness another kind of movement: the black arches seem to collapse and expand, transforming from a herd of elephants to a giant spider to an architectural space high enough to walk under, like the arcade of a cloister.

Across the room, the white ceiling is spangled with a constellation of black disks sprung from three clusters of rods (Triumphant Red, 1959-63). One cluster hangs vertical, dropping down above the viewer’s head level. The second rests horizontal, close to the ceiling, and the third makes a diagonal plunge towards the floor. The highest disk, painted bright red, is especially triumphant in the entirely black-and-white room.

On the show’s opening night, air movement from a crowd of guests caused the mobile’s branches to stir slowly around their own axes. It’s a great shame that the kinetic sculptures can’t otherwise move. (A smaller mobile is displayed with a sticker forbidding the viewers from blowing on it.)

Even the six gouaches that make up more than half of the works in the show reveal Calder’s deliberate study of weight and contrast. He again uses his classic restricted palette (black, white, red, yellow, blue), but instead of wind, the kinetic agent is water. In one work, Calder painted red circles, let them dry, and then painted a ring of water around each. Before the water dried, he painted a meandering black line across the paper. The line is solid over the dry red paint, but where it crosses the wet patches, it bleeds out slowly, becoming gray and diaphanous. The result is an optical trick: the black line seems to weave in and out of focus, close-up and then far away.

Gagosian’s Calder show coincides with a staggeringly comprehensive chronological exhibition of the artist’s works at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni curated by his grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower. With works ranging from the small metal animals he made at age 11 to photographs by Ugo Mulas of the artist working in his studio, the large exhibition gives a profound sense of the man and his lifetime achievement. Gagosian’s show, with only 11 works in one of the biggest private gallery spaces in Rome, provides a more concentrated opportunity for contemplation.

----- Diana Mellon

(Images: Alexander Calder, Monumental Sculpture, Installation view; Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery - Rome)

The first sound I heard was the clicking of high heels. All the gallery attendants at the Foundazione Roma Museo wear 4-inchers, and are dressed to kill. This is the only misstep in the museum's comprehensive retrospective of Niki De Saint Phalle, and perhaps not even that: the clicking gave me enough warning to put away my camera before I was caught snapping pictures...

Curated by Stefano Cechetto, over 100 works by Saint-Phalle are being shown; this marks the first extensive exhibition of Saint-Phalle in Italy.  Rather than a chronological arrangement, Cecchetto has developed four "Memory Rooms," which reflect thematic threads running through Saint-Phalle's career in her paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs, and in so doing, the viewer is given a template with which to explore Saint-Phalle's artistic development.

The first thing I saw upon entering the show was a colorful, poster-sized map of Italy. Instead of place names, there were names of renowned Italian artists displayed on the map. This was Saint-Phalle's homage to Italy, and clearly the respect is mutual. Beside that piece, a paper shredder and a box of colored paper stood, with instructions to "write your thoughts and shred them." The show is curated with a mix of whimsy and sincerity, and these qualities make themselves most obvious in Niki's bipolar portrayal of Woman.

Starting in 1961, Saint-Phalle began "Shooting Paintings," where she embedded  paint-filled sacs in white plaster sculptures, which she would then shoot at with a rifle. When the bullets hit the sacs, colored paint would splatter and drip on the figure. While the show has only a few of these innovative works, this target-practice art helps explains her next (and here, most represented) era of work—the Nanas.

Part goddesses, part dolls, part shooting targets, part dancers—Saint-Phalle's Nanas are voluptuous, brightly-colored plastered sculptures of women. At first the Nanas seem out of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine (which appeared in 1968, only three years after the first Nana was shown at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris). But, slowly, these figures reveal a terrifying visage of womanhood. Seen from an admiring, childlike perspective, they are an ideal—dolls; perhaps even Barbies of a kind. But from the male gaze they are idols to a singular god: sexuality. Their breasts and buttocks are painted, quite literally, as targets. This simplicity of form (smooth, bulbous) and palate (mostly primary colors) is both an aspect of the figures' female power, and what makes them an easy target. Naked means open, but open to vulnerability, too. In this way, the Nanas are simultaneously innocent and encourage transgressive thought—a matured Lolita.

The curation provides both historical data on Saint-Phalle, and (somewhat stillettoed) introductions to each of her artistic periods, but leaves it to the viewer to connect the dots. This allows for multiple interpretations and a depth of exploration.

Much of Saint-Phalle's work was spent on sculpture gardens for all ages—her Tarot Garden in Italy, and Queen Califa's Magical Circle Garden in California—and the Foundazione Roma honors this.  The exhibition is a bright and bouyant journey into the complex world of this extraordinary artist.

--Nikhil Melnechuk

(Images: Niki de Saint Phalle, 1972; Paper Shredder ©Nikhil Melnechuk; Les trois Grâces (Le tre Grazie),1994,Resina sintetica e colore vinilico,66 x 79 x 89 cm; Big Lady (Black) (La grande Lady – nera),1968/1992/1995,Poliestere, colore acrilico, vernice,zoccolo in metallo,247 x 157 x 80 cm; Mini Nana maison (Mini Nana-casa),1968 circa, Poliestere dipinto,16 x 15 x 9 cm © Niki Charitable Art Foundation, All rights reserved)