Pyramids 1975

Alexander Calder made this playful gouache painting, Pyramids, in 1976. It’s like he’s built a whole world from shapes and color, all set against this sunny yellow ground. I love how Calder just goes for it, laying down these bold, graphic forms with a kind of joyful confidence. The texture here is deceptive; the paint looks smooth, almost flat, but you can tell he's working fast, not fussing too much. Look at the way the red and blue bleeds into each other on the pyramid at the lower left of the picture – so alive. I feel like the black lines are dancing on the surface, holding all that color together. And those black circles hovering above, are they planets? Balloons? It reminds me a bit of Miro’s playful abstractions, but with Calder’s signature twist. For both of them, art is an ongoing experiment, a kind of visual conversation, and it's never really finished.