David Smith
Circle I, II and III, 1962

You are looking at–or perhaps through–David Smith's Circle 1, Circle 2, and Circle 3, all of which were made in 1962. David Smith's Circle Series is a good example of the modern era's break with traditional sculptural processes of casting and carving and molding. During the 1930s and 1940s sculptors began to configure work in a new additive way that involved gluing or welding parts together. Picking up on this new approach, David Smith developed a practice in the forties that was based on welding, and he carried this forward in work, such as the Circle Series, that he made late in his career. In the fields at Bolton Landing, Smith's farm in upstate New York, he would set the circles one behind the other, so that you could look through one circle and see the apertures of all the others nestled inside of it, giving the impression of moving into the distance.

One of the really interesting things about the Circle Series is the degree to which Smith takes on painting itself as a topic. Traditionally, modern sculpture is unpainted so it will show the marks of its making and the materials that were used, but the circles are all highly colored in a range of pinks and oranges and reds. Also, modern sculpture is usually seen in the round and doesn't project a keen sense of front and back. The circles are strongly planar, and that puts the viewer in a specific situation in looking at them. In a sense, looking through the first aperture at these receding circles evokes the terms of traditional perspective. So it's almost as if the artist has asked himself the question, "How might painting be imagined in three-dimensional space?"