The Forgings, the groundbreaking series of industrially forged steel sculptures that the artist produced in 1955 and 1956, are brought together in one book for the first time, alongside complementary sketchbook drawings of the sculptures. This catalogue, documenting an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, is the first time that all ten Forgings have been on view together since 1956. The sculptures are accompanied by a series of works on paper leading up to The Forgings, as well as sketchbook drawings of the completed sculptures. With the The Forgings, David Smith translated the spontaneity of a brushed line drawing into sculptural form, manipulating thin steel bars to achieve expressive vertical abstractions. The Forgings were unprecedented as works created solely through an industrial machined process, but were perhaps even more radical as pre-Minimalist forms intended to provoke discrete responses in each viewer.
Über den Autor Hal Foster
Through its formal acuity, Kerry James Marshall’s (b. 1955) work reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. As the artist has written, ‘I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what Art is returned as a critical issue.’ Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Marshall has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and styles, even pulling talismans from the canvases of his forbearers and recontextualizing them within a modern setting. At the center of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings and sculpture, is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility so long ascribed to black bodies in the Western pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a ‘counter-archive’ that reinscribes these figures within its narrative arc. Teju Cole is an essayist, photographer, curator, and the author of Open City (2011) and Blind Spot (2017), among other books. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham Campbell Prize, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His photography has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Milan, Berlin, Zurich, and New York, and he has given several distinguished lectureships. Originally trained as an art historian, he has written the “On Photography” column for The New York Times Magazine since 2015. Born in the United States and raised in Nigeria, Cole is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. Hal Foster has been a force in American art criticism since the late 1970s, bringing psychoanalytic and poststructural theory to bear on contemporary art and its historical precedents. In 1983 he edited the anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which helped frame postmodernism within the arts. Foster began to write for Artforum in 1978 and was a senior editor at Art in America (1981–1987) before becoming a coeditor of the journal October in 1991, and contributes frequently to Artforum, October, and the London Review of Books. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime (2002), The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), The First Pop Age (2012), and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015). He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.