Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe at a dinner in Calder’s honor, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1976 Photograph by Abner Symons © Women’s Wear DailyPhoto courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York ©2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Calder | O’Keeffe, the opening exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Palo Alto, frames the work two iconic American artists as connected by mutual admiration and artistic kinship. Modernists with key interests in common, Senior Curatorial Director Alexis Lowry observes that both created oeuvres that responded to “the embodied experience of the built and natural world.” They were also friends that respected each other’s work, but their divergent temperaments wrought contrasting results. O’Keeffe, a self-contained and disciplined artist, created paintings that fuse the tangibility of photographs with underlying currents of life force and sublimated emotion. Calder, who was interested in invisible forces such as air, gravity and motion made sculptures that transmit the joy and spiritual potential he found in nature’s ethereality.
Calder is represented by 15 works: two mobiles, a wall-mounted panel, seven sculptures and five pieces of jewelry, all on loan from the Calder Foundation. The Calders are interspersed among twelve O’Keeffe paintings borrowed from museums and private collections. They span nearly six decades of O’Keefe’s career, from 1919 to 1977, and include two early abstracts, five nature studies—bones and flowers and seaweed—three landscapes, and two proto-minimalist sky paintings. Presented in the serenely lit white spaces Hauser and Wirth’s newly opened location in a 1909 building, recently renovated by architect Luis Laplace, their dual exhibition generates a fresh and engaging aesthetic dialogue.
Sandy Rower, President of the Calder Foundation, Photo: John Seed
At the press preview Calder’s grandson Sandy Rower gave a spirited walk-through that brought his grandfather’s art to life: “We really want you to have the experience of being with the work,” he explained. At his insistence, several Calder mobiles had been hung low, and he set them in motion with his touch as he spoke. In front of an early wall-mounted piece that includes rotating suspended forms, “Little Yellow Panel,” Rower recalled how Calder had once visited Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio, stood in front of his host’s spare geometric compositions and offering that “it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate.” Mondrian, nonplussed, replied “No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.”
Alexis Lowry, Senior Curatorial Director, Hauser & Wirth
The concentrated energies of Calder’s art resonate strongly in the presence of O’Keeffe’s rarified and subtle canvases. His quirky “Thin Black Stabile,” a chimerical sheet metal sculpture that looks different from every point of view, sends plant-like forms aloft that activate O’Keefe’s austere “Sky with Moon.” In another Gwenfritz” and a nearby mobile, “Mauvaises Herbes” cast their flickering shadows on O’Keefe’s dour “Grey Lake George,” challenging its gloom. O’Keeffe’s “Jonquils #2,” is a pleasant enough painting that becomes more interesting when shaded by the passing orbs of Calder’s delicate “Untitled” mobile. Although Calder | O’Keeffe has been designed to balance the dialogue between the two artists, it feels a bit like a competition in which Calder edges out O’Keeffe for the win.
Installation view of Alexander Calder’s “Grenfritz,” 1968, “Mauvaises Herbs” (mobile), 1963 and Georgia O’Keefe’s “Grey Lake George,” 1925: Photo by John Seed
Installation view of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jonquils 2,” 1936 and a detail of Alexander Calder’s “Untitled (mobile), 1969: Photo by John Seed
Calder | O’Keeffe is a museum quality show that only an international powerhouse like Hauser & Wirth can orchestrate. Gallery owner Ivan Wirth wants the Palo Alto location to engage the locals and the giant block party that followed on opening day drew a massive crowd that formed a line out the door. Other mega-galleries have not taken hold in the Bay Area: Gagosian San Francisco closed after four years and the Palo Alto iteration of Pace Gallery lasted for six. Hauser & Wirth, with its ambitious vision, stellar curation and community orientation, will supercharge the downtown Palo Alto art scene: may it thrive for many years to come.
Ivan Wirth, co-owner, Hauser & Wirth, Photo: John Seed
Exterior view, the site of Hauser & Wirth Palo Alto, 2026 Photo: Jon McNeal Photography