NIGHT WINDOW: DAVID SMITH SPRAY PAINTINGS, 1958 – 1964

Untitled

1964

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Night Window, a solo exhibition by David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964, in West Hollywood.

17 September 2026 – 16 January 2027

Though he initially trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, much of Smith’s education took place on the factory floors of automobile and locomotive plants, where he acquired a hands-on mastery of metal that would make him the first known American artist to weld steel into sculpture.

The Sprays emerged unexpectedly from Smith’s sculpture-making. As he assembled metal components on whitewashed sections of his shop floor, his welding process left scorched silhouettes on the ground beneath. Recognizing new artistic possibility in these traces, he began arranging scraps of metal, paper and found materials on canvas, then coating the surface with commercial spray enamel—an industrial material with no precedent in fine art.

Quixote Don

1958-1959

Throughout the series, Smith’s large-format Sprays project shifting impressions of depth and atmosphere, evoking imagined landscapes or celestial realms—associations amplified by their sheer scale. First exhibited in New York in 1959 at French & Company, an Upper East Side gallery with a new contemporary art program advised by Clement Greenberg, Smith’s new works matched the ambition of the abstract expressionists and color field painters while also aligning him with a younger generation of artists exploring found materials and mechanical processes.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth also includes a selection of medium- and small-scale Sprays. Some of these works derive from machine-shop templates whose hanging holes are reimagined as compositional elements; others were made from paper or even food scraps laid down on canvas. The styles of abstraction range from sharper-edged forms to amorphous passages that seem to glow from within.