Sometimes unexpected finds and collector rediscoveries reveal new facets of an artist’s practice, particularly when they result in carefully curated exhibitions. This is illustrated in ‘Calder: Extreme Cantilever’, unveiled during Frieze Week at Ben Brown in London, where three of Calder’s cantilever sculptures were brought together for the first time. In collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the gallery’s exhibition presents these rarely seen works alongside a selection of oil paintings, works on paper and historically significant objects that echo 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 play of mass , fragility, tension and harmony.

On loan from the Calder Foundation and prestigious private collections, Calder’s three standing mobiles—Extreme overhang And More extreme cantileverboth dating from 1949, and Extreme overhang III—show how the artist’s work evolved after the war, embracing irregularly shaped and seemingly precarious materials that nonetheless communicated resilience. Its materials reflect the changing landscape of the post-war world, alongside the tensile strength and stability of modern architectural cantilevers. Varying in size and scale, each sculpture features massive triangular black shapes juxtaposed with delicate, thin metal arms that support or deploy fragile mobiles, resembling floral flowers. Calder declared in 1943 that, for him, “the most important thing in composition is disparity.” Through the exaggerated lightness and fragility of their components, these sculptures evoke a precarious imbalance, seeming on the verge of tipping or flying away to become powerful metaphors for an era defined both by the anxieties of war and the thrill of technological innovation.

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The entire exhibition was enlivened by recent rediscoveries and restorations, which made it possible to reintegrate the original mobile part of Extreme overhang (1949), the first in the series, and the exhibition of the original arm of More extreme cantilever (1949), which was much more ephemeral and based on salvaged materials, than the elegant longer one with which Calder replaced it later in his career before its exhibition at the Tate in 1962. The original stem was seen for the last time at Calder’s exhibition at MIT in 1951.

Notably, the show marks the first time Overhang have been collected and exhibited together since 1949 and the first time Extreme overhang (1949) has been exhibited in its entirety with its original mobile since the 1950s. The third in the series, Extreme overhang III (1969), reflects Calder’s persistent impulse to revisit and reinvent his work, creating a continuity of forms within his dynamic visual language. This piece, designed for his major retrospective at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, underlines the importance of cantilevers in Calder’s artistic career. Together, the three sculptures resemble fragile but resilient beings, like plant trunks bending but resisting under the weight of historical upheavals – futuristic, almost extraterrestrial presences, which, with their aerodynamic forms, project themselves into the future.

Similar formal shapes and rhythms reappear in several vibrant oil paintings featured in “Extreme Cantilever.” These works are part of a selection which accompanied the Overhang when they debuted at the Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin in New York in November 1949. While some paintings lean toward dreaminess and imagination, bordering on surrealism and echoing the generative musicality and floating forms of Miró or making symbolic reference to works such as Magritte’s pipe or the Dadaist collages, others evoke the silhouettes and systems of tension animating the Overhang. This interaction reflects the ongoing dialogue between the organic and mechanical forms that inspired them. Quasars and stars, drawn from the sea and the sky, emerge in nebulous landscapes with pure gradients and atmospheres, where protean particles float within the framework of a universe still in its magmatic genesis. A remarkably monochrome piece, Cockscomb (1949), depicts a shape resembling both a shell and a gear, revealing Calder’s intriguing thoughts as he covered vibrant colors with white brushstrokes, although hints of color still emerge beneath .

Close, Helmet deepens Calder’s exploration of the modern mechanical and industrial world. Here Calder adopts a style closer to 1930s American realism and its celebration of industrial progress, while maintaining a timeless, almost classical suspension between time, space, nature and artifice. In addition to the sculptural rarities of the exhibition, Black II (1949) illustrates Calder’s mastery of composition in air and space through color and form. This standing mobile embodies a delicate balance of opposing forces: the sturdy red arcs and fragile moving elements in black, yellow and blue are held in tenuous harmony, poised as in a rhythmic dance, ready to respond to a simple breath or touch .

TThe exhibition also features nine original drawings, many made in the same year as Extreme overhang, which provide additional information about Calder’s practice. These drawings illuminate Calder’s process and the importance he placed on graphic design to trace and imagine these systems of formal tensions on paper, elegantly translating these lines into materials and “drawing» three-dimensional figures in space. An iPad located on the desk at the gallery entrance allows for further exploration of Calder’s visual language. Here, gallery visitors can see the sketches used to identify the sculptures in the original Buchholz/Curt Valentin Gallery exhibition checklist: a few synthetic black elements and empty and solid black shapes create compositions of movement .

Characterized through extreme rigor, the exhibition stands as one of those rare unique projects that a gallery can offer, offering a unique and unexplored insight into the work of an artist at a pivotal moment in its evolution. It captures the period when Calder began to integrate the traditionally two-dimensional qualities of drawing (line and plane) into the three-dimensional realm, fundamentally reshaping the concepts of movement, form and space in sculpture. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, “Calder: Extreme Cantilever,” which offers a deeper dive into these recently rediscovered transformational phases of Calder’s practice. It includes insightful contributions from Alexander SC Rowerpresident of the Calder Foundation and grandson of Calder, as well as Ann Coxon, curator of international art at Tate Modern.

“Calder: extreme overhang» is on view at Ben Brown in London until November 22.