Alexander Calder: Calder: François Premier

In 1953, Calder returned to live in France for the first time in 20 years, settling in the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence and then in the small town of Saché in the Loire Valley. The artist’s productivity flourished in the expansive Provençal landscape and the modest, solitary spaces of a 17th-century stone house called François Premier in Saché. In Paris the following year, Galerie des Cahiers d’Art exhibited Calder’s ink and gouache paintings from Aix and Galerie Maeght presented ‘Aix. Saché. Roxbury. 1953–54’—a pair of shows that together marked Calder’s triumphant return to France.ç

Over 70 years later, inspired by a curious fortuity, the beautiful galleries of Hauser & Wirth Paris—located within an hôtel particulier on a street that also bears the name François Premier—‘Calder: François Premier’ will be the first major project dedicated to this expansive postwar period in the life and career of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century.