Photo: David Stover © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
June 9, 2015
David Smith: L2015.5
Rebecca Smith: L2015.7
Here and Above: A Dialogue Between Sculptures
Through March 2016
A year-long installation in the museum’s atrium, Here and Above situates two welded steel sculptures in a cross-generational dialogue about material, form, and the environment. Rising from the ground in a delicate balance, Two Box Structure reads as a vertical composition of geometric shapes, while also suggesting human figures. Extending from the wall overhead, Noctilucent Clouds offers a literal model of luminous, thin clouds located in the most distant part of the atmosphere, while also reading as a dynamic composition of lines in space.
Rebecca Smith (b.1954), the daughter of Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith (1906–1965), spent her early childhood in the New York hamlet of Bolton Landing, playing in the fields amid dozens of her father’s sculptures. Here the works of these two artists respond to one another as natural light activates their surfaces, drawing the surrounding space into the conversation.
Rebecca Smith
American, born 1954
Noctilucent Clouds, 2015
Stainless steel, interference acrylic paint
On loan from Rebecca Smith, courtesy Waqas Wajahat
David Smith
American, 1906-1965
Two Box Structure, 1961
Stainless steel
On loan from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Paul and Hope Makler, 1972