The present work is beautiful in its simple minimalism – white, yellow, and red and black discs poised atop a bold red base – yet also unprecedented in its ingenious structural composition, making this piece one of Calder’s most classic, striking, and elegant expressions of his internationally famous mobiles. With its geometric and biomorphic forms, the work is unfettered by any direct notion of representation. Instead, Red Molar interacts with its environment, participating actively in the universe in a riveting expression of Calder’s creative genius. This marvelous standing mobile is an immaculate encapsulation of Calder’s expertise as an innovative, wonderous artist.

Conveying a greater sense of solidity and permanence through its earthly anchorage than its fully airborne ‘mobile’ counterparts, the present work is imbued with a key sense of dynamism and movement through the addition of delicately floating wire elements and carefully suspended circular forms. The vibrant red of the base is particularly striking: Calder adored the colour, declaring, “It’s really just for differentiation but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red” (Alexander Calder and Katharine Kuh, "Alexander Calder," The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962). Contrasting angular geometric lines with rounded shapes to intriguing effect, the red base of Red Molar curves upwards towards a delicate point, upon which arcs of wire and buoyant colored circles hang suspended from the peak. Delicately creating a mesmerizing sense of architectural equilibrium on an intimate scale, Calder extends the modernist remit of color, line, and form to encompass the laws of balance, motion and chance.

It is not only form, but also colour, that makes the present work one of Calder’s most striking sculptural iterations. “To me,” wrote Calder, “the most important thing in composition is disparity,” a principle seen in this work through the use of red and yellow, along with black and white accents. Notably, Piet Mondrian’s working environment was instrumental in the artist’s development. Calder’s shift to abstraction was the result of an aesthetic epiphany during a 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio that is one of the seminal anecdotes of Twentieth Century art. It was there the artist experienced an environmental installation that embodied the spatial inventiveness of Mondrian’s neo-plastic paintings and brought these modernist elements into the viewer’s space. The aerial complexities of his mobiles would follow and the architectonic stabiles would be placed on the gallery floors so as to commingle with viewer. The two also converged in a hybrid form that captured both the stationary elegance of the stabiles with the choreography and movement of the mobiles, all of which is so dynamically and gracefully on display in Red Molar.

As Calder once described his differing bodies of work, "the mobile has actual movement in itself, while the stabile is back at the old painting idea of implied movement." (Alexander Calder and Katharine Kuh, "Alexander Calder," The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962) Here, the standing mobile spans both these worlds as it employs a stabile structure to support mobile arms and thus it resides in a liminal realm of potential energy and possibility. The work is at once active but stationary, both enigmatic yet absolute. The diversity of balance and axis in the delicate hanging elements displays a complex contrapuntal composition full of the cadence and dexterity that are unique to Calder’s canon of suspended forms, moving in a sublime metallic ballet of ever-changing composition. Renowned for their outstanding beauty and craftsmanship, Calder’s mobile elements are a test.mes nt to his technical skill, imaginative genius and talent for organic composition ; in these respects Red Molar is outstanding.