Centre Pompidou
Paris
Place Georges Pompidou
01 44781233 FAX 01 44781302
WEB
David Smith
dal 13/6/2006 al 20/8/2006
from 11am to 9pm

Segnalato da

Anne-Marie Pereira


approfondimenti

David Smith



 
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13/6/2006

David Smith

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Sculptures 1933 - 1964. This exhibition presents 46 of the artist's most important sculptures and 12 of his drawings, drawn from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. It retraces his career from its beginnings in the earliest welded works of the 1930s - inspired by Pablo Picasso and by Julio Gonzalez - focussing on a number of especially significant moments.


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Sculptures 1933 - 1964

David Smith (1906 - 1965) was one of the most innovative and influential sculptors of the 20th century. A pioneer in the use of welding and of industrial materials, he revolutionised sculpture in the United States. Marking the centenary of the artist's birth, this monographic exhibition at the Centre Pompidou / Muse'e National d'Art Moderne, the first ever in France, offers an unmissable opportunity to discover a great American artist whose work is rarely seen in Europe.

This exhibition presents 46 of the artist's most important sculptures and 12 of his drawings, drawn from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. It retraces his career from its beginnings in the earliest welded works of the 1930s - inspired by Pablo Picasso and by Julio Gonza'lez - focussing on a number of especially significant moments. The Surrealist-inspired works of the 1940s are succeeded by the landscapes of 1947-51, and these by the series that Smith began to make in the 1950s. The Agricola, Tanktotem and Voltri series testify to a continuous process of artistic development that culminates in the late, monumental works, some in painted, some in stainless steel. Among the latter are the Cubi, the last series the artist embarked on before his death. Chronologically organised, the exhibition gives an insight into the whole range and complexity of Smith's work. Its striking and radically innovative design brings out the sense of series so important to the artist, deploying the works in an open, uncluttered space that allows the public to move around every one of the sculptures, viewing to them from every angle.

David Smith, Sculptures 1933-1964 is organized by the Centre Pompidou in collaboration with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Tate Modern, London. Presented first in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from 3 February to 14 May 2006, it will be shown in Paris from 14 June to 21 august, and then in London from 25 October 2006 to 14 January 2007.

BIOGRAPHY

David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906. After a year at Ohio University, Athens, in 1924-25, he worked for a time in an automobile factory before moving to New York in 1926. In 1927, he enrolled at the Art Student's League, studying painting under John Sloan and Jan Matulka. In the early Thirties, Smith met the Russian e'migre' John Graham, who introduced him to avant-garde painters Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Edgar Levy and Jean Xceron and brought them all into contact with latest artistic developments in France. Impressed in 1929 by the welded metal sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonza'lez, Smith produced his first piece in welded metal in 1933. The particular dangers of the new technique led him in 1934 to rent space for a studio in the vast Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn, where he worked until 1940, when he left the city for Bolton Landing, near Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, in upstate New York.

A first journey to Europe in 1935-36 brought a more intimate acquaintance with European artistic developments. Returning to New York, Smith made a decisive turn towards sculpture. He was given his first solo exhibition at the East River Gallery in January 1938, where he showed 17 sculptures in welded steel.

The years after the war - during which he worked as a welder on tanks and locomotives - were extremely productive. The works of the immediate post-war period are characterised by great formal invention and imbued with a very personal symbolism. In 1947, he began an exploration of landscape as a theme for sculpture that would come to an impressive culmination in 1951 with Australia and Hudson River Landscape. It was then that he began to work in series, each developed over several years and overlapping in time. The first, the Agricolas of 1951-1957, are constructed from old agricultural machinery; in 1952 Smith produced the first of the Tanktotems, distinctively vertical works made from elements of commercially available boilers, the last of them painted in polychrome.

Opening: 14 June 2006

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou - Paris
Daily from 11 - 9

IN ARCHIVIO [145]
Anselm Kiefer
dal 15/12/2015 al 17/4/2016

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