Mark Di Suvero
(1933–)
Mark Di Suvero
1933–
Mark di Suvero (1933–) is an American sculptor born in Shanghai, China. He often uses materials salvaged from demolished buildings, and his works are directly influenced by Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.
Born in Shanghai to Venetian parents, di Suvero immigrated to San Francisco with his family in 1941. After studying sculpture and philosophy at UC Berkeley in 1957, di Suvero moved to New York City. He spent two-years in the East Village and moved to 195 Front Street, an artistic community, where his neighbors were Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Di Suvero used found materials from demolition sites. He worked with wooden beams, planks, rope, chains, and metals to build dynamic sculptures that matched the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists in exuberance and size.
In 1960, di Suvero held his debut exhibition at the Green Gallery in Manhattan, displaying three works: Hankchampion(1960), Che Farò Senza Eurydice (1959), and Barrel (1959), where he met critical acclaim and was announced as a key modernist sculptor.
After creating a fifty-five-foot-tall sculpture named Peace Tower in Los Angeles in 1966 in protest of the Vietnam War, di Suvero left America for Europe as a means of demonstrating his contempt for the war.
In 1975, he became the first living artist to have work exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Two years later, he established the Athena Foundation to help support other artists. His public sculptures are installed in cities around the world and can be found in the permanent collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Whitney, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Di Suvero’s work is also at the Storm King Art Center, where the sculptor recently supervised the installation of a massive work, close to one hundred feet tall, called E=MC2.
While living and travelling throughout Europe in the 1970s, di Suvero created a series of smaller sculptures which investigated balance and movement and interacted with viewers in a more intimate manner. In the 1980s, di Suvero returned to New York and continued creating art.