NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's will present Alexander Calder's Painted Wood as a leading highlight in the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place November 17, 2025 in New York. Measuring nearly seven feet (two meters) in height and width, Painted Wood is the largest and most significant of the artist's early wood Constellation mobiles to come to auction. The mobile is Calder at his very best, simultaneously demonstrating his strong creative abilities and his engineering prowess, balancing 11 individual components – several taking fish-like forms and others more abstracted. Kept within the same private collection for more than three decades, Painted Wood comes to Christie's exceptionally fresh-to-market from the esteemed collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and has never appeared at auction. Estimated at $15 million – $20 million, this exceptional work carries the highest auction estimate ever for a work by Calder.

Ana Maria Celis, Christie's Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art Department, remarks, “Alexander Calder played an instrumental role in the history of modern art. His mobiles, infusing delicately suspended forms with kinetic energy, have enchanted art lovers across the globe for generations. An intricate and monumental system of eleven forms in midair, Painted Wood is a singular example of Calder's mastery of the hanging mobile in wood. We are delighted to present it at Christie's this fall and look forward to seeing how collectors respond.”

Earlier in his career, Alexander Calder worked primarily in materials such as sheet metal and wire, however, by 1942, sheet metal had become a scarce resource, allocated for the production of planes as part of the war efforts. As a result, Calder looked to wood; he began exploring new formal possibilities of the medium and developed an entirely new body of work in the process—the Constellations, a rare and highly desirable group of works to which Painted Wood belongs. Influenced by the Parisian avant-garde, including Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi, Yves Tanguy, Piet Mondrian, and Alberto Giacometti, Calder absorbed their explorations of surrealism, formal purity, and spatial tension as he turned toward three-dimensional abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s. In his Constellation series, he distilled these ideas into suspended compositions of wood and wire that evoke the rhythm and balance of the cosmos.

Painted Wood boasts prestigious provenance and exhibition history. In 1943, the year it was executed, the mobile debuted in the celebrated retrospective of the artist in New York's Museum of Modern Art, curated by John James Sweeney with assistance by Marcel Duchamp. Aged 45 when it opened, Calder became the youngest artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition in the museum's history. The show featured approximately 100 works filling the indoor and outdoor space on the ground floor of MoMA's then-recently opened new galleries on 53rd Street, with large scale sculptures, delicate wire pieces, and kinetic hanging mobiles, including Painted Wood. The exhibition has been largely hailed as a pivotal moment both in the artist's career and the history of American modernism. In a letter Calder wrote to Alfred Barr in the 1960s, he claimed, “I have long felt that whatever my success has been has been greatly as a result of the show I had at the MoMA in 1943.”

Painted Wood was originally a gift from the artist to Brazilian architect, Henrique E. Mindlin, who was instrumental in expanding Calder's influence to South America. It was acquired by celebrated collector, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, over three decades ago. One of the most respected collectors of her generation, Cisneros established her eponymous foundation to acquire works of art with a deep focus on five areas: modern art, contemporary art, the colonial period of artworks from Venezuela's Hispanic and Republican periods, art from the ethnic communities of the Orinoco River basin, and works by artists who traveled to Latin America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. A generous benefactor to institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has been a steadfast champion in celebrating the arts of Latin America and ensuring their rightful place in the global artistic canon.