David Smith

Sprays

7 July 2020

Online Exhibition

Hauser & Wirth announces an online exhibition featuring the late post-war American artist David Smith (1906- 1965), including six virtual museum loans alongside significant works spanning from 1958 until 1964. ‘David Smith. Sprays’ is curated by the artist’s daughters and co-presidents of the David Smith Estate, Candida and Rebecca Smith, and Dr. Jennifer Field, Executive Director of the David Smith Estate. The pioneering body of work is presented with walkthrough films of the virtual exhibition space created in HWVR.

With thanks to contributing museums: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/de Young Museum, San Francisco; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The in-depth digital presentation celebrates Smith's innovative approach to the newly available medium of aerosol paint and the consequent interplay between colour, form and the drawn image. The Sprays represent a direct and unmediated form of expression that provide a vital counterpoint to Smith’s metal work.

When creating a sculpture, Smith would often place components of the work in progress on white-washed areas of his shop floor, before joining them together. The welding scorched the floor, leaving ‘ghost’ images of the sculpture. Inspired by these incidental patterns, Smith began work on the Sprays, employing any material at hand, from machine parts to tree branches, and even leftovers from his table, which he arranged on paper or canvas before spraying over the composition with industrial enamel paint. When the objects were removed, their silhouettes remained, sometimes with hazy outlines from the diffused paint that seeped beneath the objects’ edges. The Sprays can feature bold forms in complex rhythms against misty backgrounds that have been likened to a celestial expanse. They express the ambiguity between positive and negative space, contrasting layers of effervescent colour with areas of white. Shapes can appear weightless, sometimes clustering together and at other times moving apart amidst the sprayed pigments.

Conceived and developed in Bolton Landing, New York, Smith’s Sprays were as deeply embedded in the landscape and everyday experiences as his sculpture making. The artist's daughters recall childhood memories from summers they would spend with their father. Candida Smith explains, 'The Sprays were part of our lives just like the rest of my father's artwork, it was intermingled with everything we did all day and what he did in the night after we were asleep'. Rebecca Smith continues, 'From our bedroom my sister and I would hear the particular rattle of his spray cans as he made paintings to jazz records. I see in these works a great sense of what I knew of my father - his love of making and constructing form’.

Smith debuted the large-scale Sprays in New York in Fall 1959. Dr. Field writes about the significance of these works: ‘The Sprays’ imposing heights align them with the monumental scale that had become a defining characteristic of abstract expressionist and colour field painting. The Sprays also connect Smith’s painting practice to a new generation of artists who were engaged with issues having to do with the use of found materials (including mass-produced, or readymade, pigments) and mechanical techniques. Indeed, Smith’s Sprays would have seemed at home in the groundbreaking ‘16 Americans’ exhibition that opened that December at The Museum of Modern Art, and which featured works by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.’ Since David Smith’s tragic death in 1965, he has continued to inspire contemporary artists. The Sprays reflect Smith’s unique ability to convey a deeply humanist vision through an abstract vocabulary.

The exhibition follows ‘David Smith. Field Work’, held at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in Fall 2019 and ‘David Smith: Sculpture 1932-1965’, a major retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park that ran concurrently and was the principal contribution to the inaugural Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. The online exhibition precedes a Catalogue Raisonné of David Smith’s work, available in 2021.

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About the Artist

David Smith

David Smith is regarded as one of the most innovative artists and important American sculptors of the 20th century. He transformed sculpture by rejecting the traditional methods of carving and casting in favor of torch-cutting and welding, becoming the first artist known to make welded sculpture in America. These methods allowed him to work in an improvisational manner in creating open and large-scale, abstract sculptures. In his later years, he installed his sculptures in the fields of his home in the Adirondack Mountains, where a dialogue between the art object and nature emerged as central to his practice. His sculpture-filled landscape inspired Storm King Art Center and other sculpture parks throughout the world, as well as anticipating the land and environmental art movements.

Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. He worked briefly as a welder in an automobile factory before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1926. He studied painting at the Art Students league, where Cubism and Surrealism were foundational to his practice. He began welding sculpture around 1933 after seeing reproductions of constructed steel sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Julio González. He later became associated with the abstract expressionist movement and paved the way for minimalism with radically simplified, geometric works. Painting and drawing remained integral to what Smith called his ’work stream’. He embraced a holistic attitude toward artmaking and dismissed the idea of a separation between mediums. Acknowledging the tradition of painted sculpture throughout art history and drawing from the bold palettes of modernism and pop culture, Smith often painted his sculptures. David Smith died in 1965, leaving behind an expansive, complex, and powerful body of work that continues to exert influence upon subsequent generations of artists.

Smith began exhibiting his work as early as 1930. His first survey was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1957. His sculpture was represented by the United States at the São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Posthumous retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1979 and 2006, which traveled to Tate Modern, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio). Other major surveys have been organized at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994, traveled throughout Japan), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996), Storm King Art Center (1997–99), and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK. A three-volume, fully illustrated catalogue raisonné of Smith’s sculpture was published in 2021 by the Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press. A biography by Michael Brenson, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2022.

Current Exhibitions