Mark di Suvero

Born in Shanghai in 1933, Mark di Suvero migrated with his family when still young to the United States, where he attended the San Francisco College, dropping out of this before long. He travelled by motorcycle through Mexico, where he built ships; then he went by bicycle from San Francisco to Phoenix (Arizona) and back.
After majoring in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts and began to make sculptures with welded metal. In 1957 he moved to New York, where he joined a cooperative on 10th Street (the March Gallery), exhibiting works in plaster and wax.
In 1958 he began to use beams taken from demolished buildings in his sculptures. Soon he learned to use a crane, a fork-lift truck and a welding torch. In the 1970s he staged his first open-air shows in urban public spaces - for example, at Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, and at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, France - and, as a result of these events, he was granted the honour of becoming the first living artist to have a solo exhibition in the Tuileries Gardens, opposite the Louvre in Paris.

Di Suvero is one of the artists who, in the 1960s, helped to radically change our conception of modern sculpture. As Giovanni Carandente put it, a "heroic" sculptor, who has no qualms about large-scale works, di Suvero, like David Smith, Alexander Calder and Richard Serra, belongs to the small group of great twentieth-century artists who have adhered to the axiom of the Russian Constructivists, according to which, in sculpture, volume is no longer the absolute concept of the work in space, but it is rather the kinetic and dynamic elements that express the true nature of the space-time relationship.
Using assemblage as a working method on a gigantic scale, di Suvero draws in space, or rather he constructs with space. A feature of his intensely vital works is their capacity to communicate their potential energy, which transforms them into dynamic gestures and reckless challenges to the sky - technological challenges that, at the same time, express primordial anthropomorphism.