Artistry in Iron – A Gallery of Masterpieces

Iron art adds a distinctive and timeless touch to interiors and outdoor landscapes. Artists use techniques like welding and casting to manipulate the metal into desired shapes and designs.

With their thin cotton clothing and reputed addiction to alcohol, laundresses were ideal subjects for modern art that emphasized physical filth as moral dirt.
Albert Paley

The sculptor Albert Paley works with two inorganic materials—steel and glass—that are both manipulated by heat to yield formal expressions of gesture, movement and vitality. He combines the two in graceful synergy, the weightiness of metal amplified by glass’s lightness and fragility, the contrasting expressiveness of their respective silhouettes flowing together. In this visual analogy, the melding of opposites serves as a metaphor for the dualities of human nature. Paley’s exploration of the form vocabulary of his materials has led to a process of discovery whereby new ideas are continually explored. In this pursuit he uses his immense knowledge of the techniques and art historical precedents associated with each medium, yet remains open to the possibilities of formal elements beyond these known boundaries. His ink on paper monoprints are reductive expressions of this continual search.

Each Paley sculpture bears witness to its process; rather than concealing the marks of tooling or sanding, he deliberately imprints them upon its surface. He will purposely not polish the cast lines from a crucible, for example, and he has even experimented with blowing glass in order to leave interesting surface variation—like rings—on the resulting form.

Paley, who has held the Charlotte Fredericks Morris Endowed Chair at Rochester Institute of Technology since 1995, is one of the most celebrated American artists working in metal today. He has received many awards and honors, including the American Institute of Architects Award of Excellence. His work is in the permanent collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Several of his public commissions include tree grates along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.; a 65-foot gate at the entrance to the Strong Museum in Rochester, NY; and a sculptural relief for Wellington Place in Toronto, Canada.
Julio Gonzalez

Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942) was an artisan metal-worker, painter and skilled draftsman who was among the most innovative artists of his time. His sculptures broke down boundaries between artistic and industrial practice by incorporating space as a constructive element. This site is devoted to his work and memory.

After suffering tuberculosis in 1908, Gonzalez spent a long period of isolation that intensified with the outbreak of World War I. He worked as a studio assistant to Brancusi from 1925-26, making sculpture armatures and renewing his friendship with Gargallo who was creating works that used sheet metal cutouts. Gonzalez then exhibited a few tentative sculptures in a solo show at the galerie Povolozky in Paris and in a second show at the galerie Cahiers d’art at the end of 1934. Both exhibitions drew praise from Salmon, who wrote that “Gonzalez seems poised for greatness. His works are not only the most spontaneous of plastic efflorescences but also, perhaps the most lucid demonstration of that which has been called cubism.”

Gonzalez’s iron images, forged out of a deep sense of solitary pain and search, absorbed and were tempered by a range of aesthetic movements including cubism, constructivism, and surrealism. But his personal vision remained unbowed and independent.

When he created La Montserrat, depicting the screaming head of a peasant woman, Gonzalez returned to a more direct figuration. However, this reversion to a more traditional form was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, which caused the shortage of welding materials. He continued to draw and create plaster casts until the end of his life when he died in Arcueil. He left behind a legacy of iron art that continues to resonate with us.
Alexander Calder

The Mattatuck Museum owns two Calder mobiles (the other is the kinetic Giant Critter, which recently resided at the Denver Botanic Gardens). In addition to wire sculptures and standing mobiles, Calder also made stabiles—much larger abstract sculptures that stay still. Calder was the master of transforming common industrial materials into unpredictable and often mysterious works of art that project subliminal properties such as gravity and equilibrium.

During the 1940s, my grandfather’s search for a new means to organize three-dimensional space intensified. He began experimenting with wood, both the exotic and the humble, in addition to continuing his line of wire caricatures. In his wood work the texture of the material appealed to him, as did its capacity for assuming form.

In the spring of 1947 he displayed his first one-man show, at the Josephine Baker Gallery in New York City, which was devoted to his wire caricatures and a few wood sculptures. The show was a success, but he had a sense that his efforts to find a new idiom had come to a close and that he needed a change of pace.

His work of that year, Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere, demonstrated this desire to find a new idiom. It was a radical departure from his earlier figurative linear sculptures and marked a new phase in his search for an art expression of his own.

In this new idiom he employed a more complex composition of pivoting lengths of wire counterbalanced by thin metal fins. This new style was characterized by its dynamism and by its ability to assume many different appearances at once—a feature that would become a hallmark of his later work.
David Smith

Smith’s inclusive creative vision resulted in a remarkable range of stylistic diversity. The welded sculptures of Julio Gonzalez and Picasso influenced Smith early in his career, but he also drew inspiration from the work of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, whose own art was often more akin to collage than to traditional sculpture.

In the 1940s Smith began to make sculpture with a delicate linear quality that evoked the aesthetic of contemporary painting. Moreover, he cultivated close friendships with these artists, demonstrating the important interplay between different types of art forms at this time.

By the 1950s, Smith’s sculpture grew to take on monumental proportions as he embraced a more reductive geometric aesthetic. These massive pieces of the 1960s are considered precursors to minimalist “primary structures” of the following decade, demonstrating that Smith was ahead of his time in foregrounding a formalist and structural approach to sculpture. 鉄製品 オーダーメイド

After a brief stint in a locomotive factory to avoid the draft, Smith settled permanently at Bolton Landing in 1940. He named his studio there Terminal Iron Works after his old Brooklyn foundry, and there he constructed innovative and remarkably diverse sculpture from used machine parts, scrap metal and found objects.

From the late 1940s through the 1950s Smith exhibited extensively in one-person and group shows. A solo show of his work was presented at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1941. Smith taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville and Bennington College, Vermont as well as other schools.

In 1962 Smith was invited to make a series of sculptures for an arts festival in Spoleto, Italy. During this masterly 30-day burst of creativity, he produced 27 sculptures in the small industrial town of Voltri, evidently using all the raw materials available to him at hand. This experience influenced the way that Smith later contrasted figurative motifs in his larger-scale geometric abstract sculptures.
Richard Serra

Among the pioneers of Minimalism, Serra is best known for works that reimagine the relationship between gravity and space. His spiraling arcs, spliced cylinders and colossal Torqued Ellipses challenge the viewer to feel both the tension and beauty of steel as it moves and sculpts. His explorations of curved forms and their interaction with gravity also led him to create a vocabulary that is more akin to natural phenomena than the rigid shapes of traditional sculpture.

In the 1960s, he began making sculptures from industrial materials, including lead and steel. His first exhibition was at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York, where he showed several Splash pieces — splashings or castings of molten lead at the intersections between wall and floor. He then started experimenting with Props, which consisted of metal forms that were not welded together and that were displayed in ways that demonstrated balance (a rod holding a sheet of steel flush against a wall, for example, or two sheets precariously leaning against each other).

With these works, Serra came closer than his Minimalist contemporaries to defining a style that incorporated the concept of sculpture as an architecture that would shape the space in which it was exhibited. But even as he made these huge sculptures, such as One Ton Prop and others, he denied the spectator any starring role in his work.

In the late 1990s, Serra created a series of eight sculptures in weathering steel called Snake that he designed to fit into a single room of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The snaking passages of the sculptures resemble a city’s angular buildings, and their tilted form creates a sense of movement in the large interior space. Snake exemplified Serra’s deepest reflections on the nature of space and sculpture and inspired his later Torqued Ellipses, which defy logic and gravity to appear as malleable as felt.