David SmithForm in Color

David Smith (1906–1965) is widely regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the twentieth century. Conceptually, a distinction between sculpture, painting and drawing was no longer an option for him. Much of the power of his works derives from this radically open approach. Even if the sheer physicality of the welded steel sculptures has a strongly industrial air, their surfaces are always marked by gestural and haptic phenomena created by the application of paint by hand. The impact of his work lies not least in his insistence that sculpture has the same visual significance as painting and drawing, and that painting and drawing in turn unfold the same spatial effect. The present catalogue covers 21 works, from the late 1950s to 1965, thus documenting his development with a wealth of illustrative material, including historical photographs from the archive of the Estate of David Smith. Born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906, David Smith first attended college, at Ohio University among other places, and moved to New York in 1926, where he began studying at the Art Students League. In the early 1930s he focused entirely on sculpture, welding together constructions from found objects and forged metal. In 1940 he moved to Bolton Landing, outside New York, where he set up a studio in a factory building, amply equipped with industrial materials and tools. From the late 1950s onwards he installed monumental works in the hilly landscape around his studio. In 1965 David Smith died in a car accident near Bennington, Vermont. David Smith pointed the way for artists such as John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd and Richard Serra, for it was he who freed the site of sculptural production from the constraints of the nineteenth-century artist’s studio and the art foundry and connected it with the industrial context of the twentieth century.

Exhibition:
Hauser & Wirth Zürich, 12/6–18/9/2016