Mary Abbott

Prescence

"Untitled" is a watercolor painting by Raymond Parker. This work was painted in 1979, and is inscribed in pencil in the lower middle, "For Pat <3 RP 1979". The framed size is 25 1/4 ...

"Untitled" is an oil on canvas painting made by Hans Hofmann in 1962. The artwork size is 25 x 30 1/4 inches. The framed size is 33 1/4 x 38 1/4 x 2 inches. The painting is signed lo...

"Untitled" is a painting by American artist David Smith. David Smith’s paintings from the 1930s rarely come to market, and when Untitled (Billiard Players) surfaced at a Christie’s auction in 2018, it created quite a stir, realizing an impressive price of $1.15 million. Painted around the same time, Untitled shares many similarities with Untitled (Billiard Players). Both paintings affirm Smith’s place among the American artists when ideas and style began to intermingle and coalesce around Picasso’s innovations. Uniquely positioned in temperament and ability, Smith was a man of considerable ambition whose direct-metal configurations would have much to do with achieving new ideas about abstraction. Yet all along, he insisted he was a painter, not a sculptor who painted. Paintings by Smith...

"Untitled" is a painting by artist David Smith. The work is signed and dated in the upper left "David Smith (symbol) 1936". When David Smith set up a workshop on the Brooklyn Navy Pier in 1933 to learn direct-metal techniques, he shared the space not with artists, but with professional welders. Yet as he stated in 1964, ‘…all my early friends were painters…I never conceived of myself as anything other than a painter because my work came straight through the raised surface.’ Picasso and Cubism would be dominant influences in Smith’s work. He understood that Picasso imagined the world as a sculptor might, and not necessarily limited to the unavoidable impact of Cubism. In addition to pursuing a kind of rethinking of the world in three-dimensionality on his own terms, by the late 1920s, Picasso had shown interest in surrealism. That meant drawing not as a depiction of reality, but rather as a reconfiguration of the body in an assemblage of often precariously balanced, interconnected forms — some expressed in a three-dimensional form, others as drawings or paintings. Those processes are reflected in this work by David Smith; three fanciful totemic assemblages set within a landscape perspective of ground, mountains, and sky and whose presence is surreal enough to cast shadows under a presumed solar presence. Untitled, 1936 embraces surrealism, yet also serves to demonstrate the extent to which his thought processes are inextricably linked to sculpture and related to scale, spatial orientation, and three-dimensionality. With that in mind, it is not surprising to know that Smith saw no demarcation between sculpture and painting, or that a painting such as Untitled (1936) can exist outside of planning or design for future three-dimensional work. Provenance: Estate of David Smith, New York Hauser & Wirth Private Collection Exhibition: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, ‘David Smith: Skulptureen, Zeichnungen [David Smith: Sculpture and Drawings]’ Dusseldorf/DE, March 14 – April 27, 1986 (travelled to: Städtische Galerie im Stäelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt/DE, June 19 – September 28, 1986: Whitechapel Art Gallery...

Red and blue abstract by Carmel, California artist Heidi Hybl (American, 20th Century). Rendered in bold tones of red, black, and blue, this piece has a brutalist architectural feel....

Abstract figure in pink by by San Francisco, California area artist Daniel David Fuentes (American, 1978-2016), (AKA, Xavier Lundt) (American, 20th Century). From a collection of hi...

Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...

Fritz Bultman set himself apart from other Abstract Expressionists with his meticulously organized abstract compositions, use of sculpture, and the adoption of collage as a core prac...