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The American artist Alexander Calder created this mobile called 'La Balance' in 1956. This sculpture is made of painted steel and stretches over three metres above the viewer. The mobile resembles a pair of scales: on one side you can see two horizontal surfaces, one black and one blue, which are balanced against each other. These are attached to another arm. The other part of the scale is made up of seven red surfaces, which branch out in a delicate way and are distributed over a total of six arms. Despite their complex structure, these are also harmoniously balanced.

Calder was a proponent of kinetic art, which he helped to shape from the 1930s onwards. From 1932 he was a member of the Abstraction-Création group, to which Lucio Fontana also belonged. Both worked intensively with the theme of space. Calder's mobiles not only occupy the physical space they circumscribe, but also have an invisible radius of movement that they utilise.

The delicate metal construction of 'La balance', in its floating lightness, is reminiscent of plant-like structures. The branches react to air currents and begin to move until they stabilise in a new equilibrium. The shape of the mobile is not fixed, but unfolds in a variety of states created by spatial influences. La Balance thus evokes associations with balance, gravity and the relationships between the elements.

Calder's work was first shown in Germany in June 1952 in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. This mobile is an example of Calder's artistic exploration of space, movement and the invisible physical forces that influence our world.