TONY SMITH:
Wall (1964) and The Keys to. Given! (1965)

ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA:
Songs of the Cowboy Junkies (2006)

 September 9th - December 16th, 2006

GRIFFIN is pleased to announce an exhibition of two major sculptures by Tony Smith:  Wall (1964) and The Keys to. Given! (1965). Fabricated in Smith’s signature black-painted steel, both works will be on display in the main gallery.

Tony Smith (1912-1980) is renowned today for the large-scale abstract sculptures he created in the last 20 years of his life.  However, his art developed from his decades-long practice as an architect.  The two sculptures on view, Wall and The Keys to. Given!, represent a prolific moment in his development as a sculptor: namely, the intersection of his architectural mind with the artistic possibilities presented by monumental abstraction and industrial production.

Created in 1964, Wall is one of Tony Smith’s most influential works – a monolith that redefines its environmental space by forcefully dividing it.  While Wall resembles Minimalist Art of the 1960s at first glance, Smith’s sculptures were based on observation and experience of the real world rather than the Minimalists’ interest in stripping down objects to their elemental geometric and conceptual form. Wherever it is installed, Wall literally becomes what its title indicates.

The Keys to. Given!  from 1965 incorporates the type of intricate symmetry that defines many of Smith’s most well-known pieces. As noted art historian Lucy Lippard observed, the folded L-shaped units that comprise the sculpture are “absolutely symmetrical with the ‘same thing happening along all three axes of symmetry’, yet the experience is one of great complexity.  Keys to is one of several of Smith’s sculptures which, if turned, reproduce themselves”.1  The title, The Keys to. Given!, was taken from the final moment of James Joyce’s last and most demanding novel, Finnegans Wake. Smith’s homage to the quintessential modernist novel acknowledges a sense of debt toward the modernist past but also to the way his sculpture, like Joyce’s novel, unites several different languages into a single form.

1 Lucy Lippard, “Tony Smith: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible”, in Art International 11, Summer, 1967.