Alexander Calder

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Alexander Calder
Four Arches
1973

Project Area: Bunker Hill
Project: Bank of America Plaza
Project Location: 333 S. Hope Street
Project Type: Developer Initiated

Description:

Alexander Calder’s Four Arches is a gleeful 63' h abstract sculpture made of carbon plate steel and painted a bold vermilion. The sculpture is located at the top of a flight of subtly sloping steps in the plaza of a 52-story office tower. Surrounded on all sides by trees, colorful potted plants, and modernist office buildings, Four Arches’ immense reddish main curves stem from one main spine and race through the sky like steel ribbons. Almost hypnotically, the sculpture slightly rises off the ground with parts of the finely brick-worked terrace extending along with the bases of the sculpture like individual organic pedestals for each supporting limb. This striking painted sculpture has a high profile on Bunker Hill and serves as a distinctive landmark that beautifully frames the surrounding buildings and a small nearby park area.

Artist Profile

One of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of the 20th century, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) grew up amongst a family of classically trained painters and sculptors thus making it natural for him to pursue his interest in art. During his high school years, Calder’s family frequently moved back and forth between California and New York, which fostered the diverse influences on his art. Although Alexander Calder attended the Stevens Institute of Technology where he received a degree in Engineering, he eventually decided to pursue his original love for art and moved to New York City where he enrolled in the Art Students League. Developing a new method of sculpting, Calder began bending and twisting wire, essentially "drawing" three-dimensional figures in space. Calder is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. In 1969, Calder’s monumental public artwork, La Grande Vitesse, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first public work of art in the United States to be funded by the government under the National Endowment for the Arts Art in Public Places program.