TEHRAN – The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) has reinstalled American sculptor Alexander Calder’s “The Orange Fish” nearly five years after it was removed to allow the museum to undergo a renovation.

The mobile 447 X 190-centimeter sculpture was suspended from the ceiling in the exact location in a TMCA hall where it had been installed previously when the museum was inaugurated in 1977.

The TMCA renovation project was initiated in May 2018.

It reopened provisionally on January 28, 2021, with an exhibition displaying works by Western photographers and conceptual artists, including Dennis Oppenheim, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Edward Ruscha.

An exhibition of artworks by American artist Andy Warhol and a showcase reviewing image geometry in Persian painting reopened in the museum permanently on June 8.

The museum removed “The Orange Fish” in 2004 to loan the precious artwork for the exhibition “Joan Miro, Alexander Calder” held in May at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

The artwork was restored before by the Swiss expert Marcus Gras under the supervision of the foundation to be showcased at the exhibition. “The Orange Fish” returned home in October 2004.

In its courtyard, the museum also displays Calder’s “Prickly Pear” produced of sheet metal, bolts, and paint in 1964.

The TMCA is home to works by many august artists of the West, including Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, and notable in the world for its historical narration of art with the largest collection of Western art that exists in the East.

Calder, who passed away in 1976, is best known for his creation of mobile sculpture and is generally regarded as one of the 20th century’s most innovative and witty artists.

Calder’s mobiles – so named by French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp – are suspended, elegantly balanced arrangements of abstract, organic forms. 

The stabiles – so named by French avant-garde sculptor Hans Arp – are stationary abstract forms that frequently convey a humorous suggestion of animal shapes.

Although Calder’s stone, wood and bronze sculptures, his drawings, his later paintings and almost exclusively gouaches are important, his reputation rests primarily upon his mobiles and stabiles.

Photo: American sculptor Alexander Calder’s “The Orange Fish” is seen reinstalled at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art on January 28, 2023. (TMCA)

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