Painted Steel

Public Reception: Saturday, April 18, 6:00 to 8:00pm

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery's first exhibition of the work of David Smith. The show is organized in conjunction with the Estate, which is lending six major works to the exhibition. A seventh comes from the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. The exhibition, "Painted Steel: The Late Work of David Smith" comprises seven of the most significant of the late painted sculptures, dating from 1960-1964. A full-color catalogue with an essay by William Rubin will accompany the exhibition, which is the first to focus on the late painted works. A concurrent exhibition of related drawings and paintings will be shown at the uptown gallery.

The painting of sculpture was one of the central preoccupations of David Smith's career. Fully one-third of the artist's works were painted, including the first free-standing sculpture he ever made, a coral head painted maroon in 1932. Notes about color began to appear in his sketchbooks around 1940, and in 1960, the first year documented by the Gagosian Gallery show, eighteen of twenty-four sculptures he made were painted. As a sculptor who had begun as a painter, Smith was uniquely qualified to fulfill his ambition of creating something that Picasso and Matisse hadn't even attempted to achieve: sculpture informed by painting, or, as Frank O'Hara put it, "sculpture looking at painting and responding in its own fashion." Smith always emphasized his roots in painting: "I never conceived of myself as anything other than a painter because my work came right through the raised surface, and color and objects applied to the surface." Gradually the canvas became the base, and the painting was a sculpture. I have never required any separation except one element of dimension."

The late painted works are the culmination of Smith's long meditation on the subject of color in sculpture. Among the major pieces included in the Gagosian Gallery exhibition are Tanktotem IX, Three Planes, Black White Forward, Zig V and Gondola II. All the major themes of Smith's work are represented as well as two major series, the Tanktotems and the Zigs. Zig V is a geometric construction based on Cubism with the mass and presence of a Cubi. As the conservator Albert Marshall has noted, the Cubis were burnished to a brushstroke appearance that owes a lot to Smith's way of feathering in different colors together on the surface of Zig V. Indeed, color was essential to Smith's vision for the Cubis: "I like outdoor sculpture and the most practical thing for outdoor sculpture is stainless steel, and I make them and polish them in such a way that on a dull day they take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in the late afternoon sun...the colors of nature." Zig V also has the distinction of expressing Smith's unique and grand style of drawing in paint, in large gestures, in proportion to his size.