David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Installation view
David Smith
Cubi II, 1962
Stainless steel, 130 ½ × 36 ⅞ × 23 ⅞ inches (331.5 × 93.7 × 60.6 cm)
Photo by David Smith
Sometimes when I start a sculpture, I begin with only a realized part, the rest is travel to be unfolded much in the order of a dream. The conflict for realization is what makes art not its certainty, nor its technique or material.
—David Smith
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of monumental sculptures by David Smith made between 1962–1964.
A pioneer of modernist twentieth-century American sculpture, Smith created these works during periods of intense production in Voltri, Italy, and at his workshop in Bolton Landing, New York. Beginning in 1952, he increasingly conceived his sculptures as distinct bodies of works that shared a thematic basis or a common material. Often he worked on several such series simultaneously, insisting that each grouping be understood as continuous parts of his concept rather than as variations on a theme. The monumentality of the Voltri, Cubi, Primo Piano, and Gondola series reflects Smith's ambition to create sculptures on a scale with the expansive rolling fields surrounding his home and studio at Bolton Landing.
In Voltri XVII (1962) and VB XVII (1963) Smith continued his practice of incorporating found objects and materials into sculptures that marry industrial processes with forms inspired by natural phenomena, such as clouds and mountains. In 1962, he was invited to participate in the "Festival of Two Worlds" in Spoleto, Italy. Working at a decommissioned steel factory in nearby Voltri, he created an astonishing twenty-seven sculptures in just thirty days. The surplus metal was then shipped to Bolton Landing where it became the raw material for the sculptures that comprise the subsequent Voltri-Bolton series: VB, Voltron and Voltri-Bolton.
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