Industrial Space

Today's culture of intermedia hybridity, cross-genre pollinating, and interdisciplinary dialogue owes a debt to David Smith (1906–65). He was one of the first American artists to not only express a desire to dissolve the barriers separating sculpture, painting, and drawing, but to achieve it in his work. A (corrective) follow-up to the 2006 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, this show of paintings and works on paper at Gagosian Gallery spotlights a cache of rarely seen, spectacular works by Smith, best known for his groundbreaking and innovatively American sculpture. It is a rich visit offering a deep look at more than 60 pieces made between 1957 and 1965.

Echoing his improvisational procedure for making sculpture, these works were made by laying out forms for relationships on a fresh page or bare canvas and spraying on and around them with commercial aerosol enamels. For Smith, the role of drawing was an imaginative exercise as important to him as other modes of inquiry, and he saw enormous possibilities of making art with industrial materials. A large vertical painting, "Island in Alaska" (1959), has an irregularly shaped off-white frame with a center of brilliant reds, ochres, and blues. Atomized colors thicken the space of the inner field. A fish-like shape in the center appears suspended in a substance that is not quite air, not quite water, but something unnameable, unknown. Progressive even today, these works speak about a space that is simultaneously fictive, painterly, sculptural, and cosmic.

A glance around the room of works on paper recalls the spectral thrill of fireworks. In "No. 49, Untitled" (1960), an unwieldy mass of centrally stacked, light-filled circles, bars, and lines whirls in a boundless bronze décor. A cloud of darker spray closes in around the ghostly shapes and one can almost feel the space carved between, below, above, and beyond.

These drawings reflect the blending of Smith's sculptural and painterly intelligence. By stepping back and forth abruptly yet elegantly between the language of two-dimensional space-making and a type of three-dimensional shorthand, Smith created images that poetically represent a true hybrid of intent.