David Smith

David Smith was born in Indiana (USA) in 1906.
The son of the pioneer generation, he witnessed the reality of heavy industry and a spell spent working in a factory had such an impact on his formation that the assembly of metal parts was to become a basic feature of his work.
An initial period, when he studied painting in New York with the Czech-born abstract painter Jan Matulka, influenced his later output, which was to consist mainly of sculpture. He started to produce sculpture in a Surrealist style in the period from 1930 to 1933, making works in metal with strong symbolic associations.
Often enigmatic, they were the result of the assembly of figurative fragments, geometric forms, numbers, letters and found objects in the Terminal Iron Works in New York. At this time he was greatly impressed by the welded metal sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González, and this new technique became his principal working method.

In 1940 he settled on a farm at Bolton Landing, in upstate New York; here he displayed his monumental sculptures in large park and continued to work until his death in 1965. After more calligraphic and linear sculptures around 1950, he started to produce works in series, such as Agricola and Tank Totem, characterized by reference to the human figure, and subsequently those entitled Voltri-Bolton - made with pieces found in the abandoned Italsider steelworks at Voltri, near Genoa, and shipped back to the United States - Zig and Cubi, which were both monumental and rigorously geometric.