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Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture by David Smith. The works in the "David Smith: Related Clues" exhibition span Smith's mature output from 1931 until just prior to his untimely death in 1965. The exhibition will interweave and make visual comparisons among Smith's sculptures, drawings and paintings. As David Smith has written:
"I have intensified only part of the related clues; the sculpture possesses nothing unknown to you. I want you to travel, by perception, the path I traveled in creating it. You can reject it, like it, pretend to like it, or almost like it, but its understanding will never come with words, which had no part in its making, nor can they truly explain the wonders of the human sensorium."
Central to Smith's work was his never-ending commitment to revealing and articulating his identity as an artist. The exhibition will create a perceptual experience of the varied works in correlation with each other. Sculptures, drawings and photographs from his visit to the Virgin Islands in 1932-33 will be juxtaposed with works from the 1950s including examples from the Agricola series and contemporaneous bone reliefs and drawings, as well as monumental stainless steel geometric structures and correlating works on paper and canvas from the 1960s.
Major works from the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum - Harvard University Art Museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, will be shown in context with works from the David Smith Estate, expanding the visual vocabulary Smith developed throughout his oeuvre. Smith wrote: