Heather James is proud to offer an exceptional collection of gouache works by the midcentury master Alexander Calder. All completed in the last decade of the artist’s life, these works show Calder in full command of his distinctive artistic language.

Although we know him today best for his sculptures, Calder started his artistic career as an abstract painter, always preferring gouache as a medium for his painted work. Sometimes known as opaque watercolor, gouache is a water-soluble paint which handles much like watercolor for the artist. Watercolor and gouache both allow the artist to paint quickly, but both are also extremely unforgiving mediums as they dry quickly and are difficult to rework. However, unlike watercolor, which has a translucent appearance, gouache contains white pigment, rendering the color opaque. Calder valued gouache for exactly these reasons, it dried quickly like a watercolor but rendered bold colors that he sought.

This exhibition strives to gives a fuller picture of the unique vocabulary that Calder employed to explore the same themes of color, movement, and spatial enquiries from different perspectives.