Smith’s welded metal sculptures depict abstract assemblages of lines, colours, and shapes, creating a network of intersecting planes, which define a hollow space at the heart of each piece. Artworks become the frame to support a dynamic interaction between forms in space.
Collaged sculptures
Smith’s sculptures are influenced by his training as a painter, the shift from working in two to three dimensions coming through making collage and relief works, building up the canvas until they became sculptural. He experimented with treating the canvas as a base and generated an understanding of sculpture as an assemblage of existing elements.
Early works like Helmholtzian Landscape (1946) stem from his abstract urban landscape paintings, to which he had attached pieces of wood, metal, and found objects, transforming the canvas into a supportive base for massive sculptural superstructures. Painted blue, yellow, and red, Smith’s large steel tableau drew from Cubist and Surrealist influences, depicting a flat figure assembled from imperfect shapes hovering inside a frame, and referenced Hermann von Helmholtz, a 19th century physician and scientist known for his research on colour theory and perception.
Freestanding sculptures
Smith became interested in freestanding sculptures in the early 1930s after seeing illustrations of Pablo Picasso’s welded metal works. Known for being ‘coreless’, Smith’s sculptural forms use thin wires to draw figurative motifs into space.
The technique allowed for spontaneous expression, eventually culminating in a vast body of stylistically diverse biomorphic forms like Hudson River Landscape (1951).
Defying traditional sculptural forms, the welded steel work Hudson River Landscape offered an abstracted three-dimensional representation of the area around Smith’s Bolton Landing home, as an open linear construction painted across space.
Series
During World War II, Smith moved to Bolton Landing, New York where he worked in a defence plant assembling trains and tanks. By the end of the 1940s, Smith began to make stylistically unified series, often working on multiple series at the same time.
Zig (1960)
The early ‘Zig’ series (1960) marked the sculptor’s turn to geometrical forms, showing hints of Cubist influences with painted surfaces employed to emphasise the relationship between planes.
Cubi (1963–1965)
The subsequent ‘Cubi’ series (1963–1965) sought to achieve the same affect using natural light, which not only flattened the three-dimensional shapes, but emitted a glare that deterred viewers from taking in their complete forms in their entirety.
Among them, a standing steel work Cubi VI. Here the oddly stacked geometrical shapes can be perceived from varying angles, appearing at once to take up space, yet weightless.
