David Smith: Personage
Installation view
David Smith: Personage
Installation view
David Smith
Untitled (standing figure with phallic detail), 1955
Bronze, 35 ⅞ × 7 ⅝ × 7 ⅝ inches (91.1 × 19.4 × 19.4 cm)
David Smith
Untitled, 1955
Egg ink on paper, 17 ½ × 22 ½ inches (44.4 × 57.2 cm)
David Smith
DS 5,4,58, 1958
Ink on paper, 22 ¾ × 18 inches (57.8 × 45.7 cm)
David Smith
Portrait of a Painter, 1954
Bronze, 96 3/16 × 24 ½ × 11 ⅞ inches (244.3 × 62.2 × 30.2 cm)
David Smith
The Woman Bandit, 1956–58
Cast iron, bronze, steel, 68 ¼ × 12 ⅛ × 12 ½ inches (173.4 × 30.8 × 31.8 cm)
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Personage, an exhibition of sculptures, paintings and drawings by the American sculptor David Smith. Personage spans Smith's artistic output from 1947 until just prior to his untimely death in 1965. This exhibition celebrates David Smith's centenary and coincides with a major retrospective of his work at Tate Modern.
Curated by Candida Smith and Peter Stevens of the David Smith Estate, Personage includes significant loans from the Tate Gallery and the Reina Sofia Madrid, as well as from important private collections and the estate of the artist. It focuses on Smith's constant return to the motif of the human figure, making visual comparisons among his sculptures, drawings and paintings. This is a rare opportunity to consider the impact of Smith's career on the development of twentieth-century sculpture.
Smith pioneered the welding technique in sculpture and is best known for his large-scale metal pieces constructed from used machine parts, abandoned tools and scrap metal. Beginning in the late twenties, and throughout his life, Smith used the figure as a point of reference from which drawings, paintings and sculpture drew resonant meaning. In one of his historic interviews from 1961, David Sylvester asked Smith whether it was correct to see personages in the seemingly abstract sculptures that he was creating at the time. Smith replied, "They don't always start that way…I can't get away from it. There is no such thing as truly abstract. Man always has to work from his life." As a sculptor who had begun his career as a painter, Smith's works demonstrate a refusal to delineate between painting and sculpture or between abstract and figurative work.
David Smith was born in Indiana in 1906 and died in a car accident in Vermont in 1965. Throughout and beyond his lifetime, his work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994 travelling), The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (2000), and the current David Smith Centennial (travelling, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Modern, London).
A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Alex Potts and including many previously unpublished photographs taken by Smith will accompany the exhibition.
The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.
In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. The show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting.
Francis Bacon lived and worked in Paris for a decade starting in the mid-1970s. The city and the art he encountered there provided a profound backdrop for his austere late style, which often brings together smooth, colorful backgrounds, spare architectural signifiers, and sculptural human forms. Here, three striking paintings from that period are considered by Sebastian Smee.
An exhibition at Gagosian, Hong Kong, brings together three of James Turrell’s Glasswork pieces along with site plans, photographs, and models of his Skyspaces and Roden Crater. Here, Alice Godwin explores the history of the Glassworks and their relationship to the artist’s wider practice.
Janne Sirén considers Anselm Kiefer’s new paintings, the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, entitled Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still.
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.
Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.
The most recent edition of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, pairs Mary Gaitskill’s novella STAUF: A Tragedy with Jill Mulleady’s painting The Shift. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Gaitskill and Mulleady discuss the myth of Faust, good and evil in the digital age, and the channeling of raw matter into art.
