TRLab, an NFT platform co-founded by Christie’s deputy chairman Xin-Li Cohen, is bringing Alexander Calder’s acclaimed artworks into the digital world
Alexander Calder worked in multiple dimensions. The American artist, who died in 1976, made thousands of drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures and—most famously—distinctive hanging mobiles, which moved art off walls and plinths and into the air. Calder even took art into the sky when he designed the livery for two aeroplanes, transforming them into flying canvases. Now, Calder’s work will enter a dimension that didn’t even exist in the artist’s lifetime: for the first time, Calder’s work is being transformed into NFTs.
“Calder was a disruptor, a pioneer in perception who continually reinvented ways to communicate his ideas,” says Alexander S C Rower, Calder’s grandson and the founder and president of the Calder Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving and promoting the artist’s work. “I believe if he were alive today that he would be energised by the multidimensionality of this moment.”
The Calder Foundation is bringing Calder’s art into the digital world through a collaboration with TRLab, an NFT sale platform and production studio for fine-art NFTs that teaches art history through technology by building digital experiences and educational programmes around the art it sells. TRLab was co-founded by Christie’s deputy chairman Xin Li-Cohen and is backed by both influential art collectors and leading tech companies, including investor and art patron Wendi Murdoch; NFT collector WhaleShark; Animoca Brands, the Hong Kong-based software company founded by Yat Siu; Pace Verso, the NFT arm of Pace, one of the world’s leading galleries; and Dragonfly, a crypto-focused venture fund headquartered in San Francisco.