A note from gallery owner Roy
Saper:
Arthur Bauman
is clearly the best mobile designer
and fabricator we've ever seen.
His talent is beautifully evidenced by
the phenomenal designs shown in these
pictures of mobiles now on display here
at Saper Galleries.
Bauman's mobiles are of great
volume yet they are light and airy and without
weighty mass. They look great from every
vantage point. Their design is exquisite
when viewed from directly beneath the mobiles
where one can fully appreciate the
relationship between adjacent pieces in terms
of spacing and dimensions of the fabricated
elements. With the slightest air
movement Arthur Bauman mobiles are in slow but
continual motion.
I bought a Bauman mobile many
years ago as the first work of art I hung in
my own home. I am certain you would
enjoy one, too!
And, from the artist:
I began making mobiles in 1968 in Amman,
Jordan, while stationed at the U.S.
Embassy. I saw two films on Alexander
Calder which the State Department had sent
around to the more isolated diplomatic posts and
I was entranced. So in my leisure
time I took up making mobiles, at first with
whatever materials were at hand: clothes hanger
wire, tin can tops, and even yarn left over from
my wife's rug-making.
Then, seriously hooked, I
bought some tools, aluminum sheet and spring
steel wire. I continued to make mobiles at
posts to which I was assigned, and gave three
exhibits abroad -- in Jordan, Morocco and
Belgium.
In 1972, while on leave in the
United States, I gave an exhibit in Fort Myers,
Florida, and the owner of a gallery on nearby
Sanibel Island offered to show my work.
Later, while still in the Foreign Service, I
gave exhibits in Germany and at the National
Museum Art Gallery in Singapore.
Eventually, in 1981, I left the
Foreign Service to work full time on mobiles, and
have since given half a dozen exhibits in this
country. My work is currently shown in
several galleries in the United States.
Anyone who makes mobiles owes a huge debt to
Alexander Calder, who after all invented the art
form. But I soon developed my own
distinctive style and artistic vocabulary.
I am especially interested in structure and in
creating a piece that is well balanced
esthetically from whatever angle you may see it --
with its three-dimensionality.
And when you watch a mobile move in an air
current, as it shifts and revolves, you add the
fourth dimension, time. As with music and dance,
it's a performance.