David Smith

Origins & Innovations

13 November - 23 December 2017

New York, 22nd Street

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present its first New York solo exhibition of work by David Smith (1906 – 1965). Offering a fresh, in-depth examination of his varied career, ‘Origins & Innovations’ brings together the artist’s paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures of the 1930s alongside examples of his later work, for which he is best known. Instead of isolating distinctions between media or periods in Smith’s oeuvre, this exhibition elucidates the connections between his earliest inspirations and his life-long investigation of their potential.

‘Origins & Innovations’ will be on view through 23 December 2017 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street.

David Smith transformed sculpture by radically changing the site of its production from the atelier and foundry to the industrial factory. In making his own work, rather than relying on assistants, Smith elevated sculpture to the status of painting – infusing it with the same directness and evidence of the artist’s hand. Along with the materials for which Smith is better known, such as welded steel, the exhibition includes less familiar aspects of his practice: such as brightly painted reliefs made from animal bones, surreal figures assembled from commercial bronze sand casts of hand-carved wood forms, and small abstracted animal forms modeled in clay that exude a primal sense of process.

Richly inventive, Smith built his aesthetic cumulatively and refused to restrict his practice to a single style, method, medium, or subject. His exploration and embrace of a diverse array of sources, transformed by his tremendous creative energy and a powerful belief in his own identity as a unifying force, enabled him to forge a new language for sculpture and to create multiple distinct bodies of work in a broad range of media. By displaying Smith’s oeuvre as a dynamically heterogeneous whole, rather than as a segmented linear narrative, and including major museum loans, as well as works that have never been exhibited before, this exhibition reveals surprising juxtapositions of materials and scale that shed new light on Smith’s lasting artistic legacy.

The exhibition highlights Smith’s radical approach to line, space, and mass, as well as his merging of forms from nature and industry. For example, his early use of line and sense of motion can be seen in a wide variety of works, including a delicate ink drawing done in the Virgin Islands, and a photograph printed from a handmade negative, both from the early 1930s; the looping steel sculpture, ‘Swung Forms,’ (1937); the openly sinuous construction of rough iron fragments of farm machinery, ‘Agricola VIII,’ (1952); an untitled 1960 drawing of accumulated black egg ink gestures; and the glistening stainless steel construction, ‘Three Circles Related,’ (1958 – 59), which transforms industrial scraps into geometric shapes with lyrical, figurative grace.

Smith acknowledged the creative continuity that connects humanity across millennia. He embraced the entirety of his artistic lineage, from prehistoric cave painting, to art of tribal communities bound by myth, to that which is codified within the histories of Eastern and Western art-historical culture. An ardent autodidact, Smith consistently acted on the belief that unity and meaning are created only through an open and inclusive celebration of all that is human. By connecting with the world around him, he successfully synthesized a specific yet expansive visual language that pushed him, as well as those who encounter his work, to truly look afresh.

A forthcoming book from Hauser & Wirth Publishers will document ‘David Smith. Origins & Innovations’ through extensive illustrations and texts that expand upon the exhibition’s themes.

Installation views

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