“Part of the beauty of learning and loving the technique is that you make something very difficult look easy.”
Mark di Suvero
(b. Shanghai, China, 1933)
Mark di Suvero (b. Shanghai, China, 1933) immigrated to the U.S. as a child. An internationally renowned artist and pioneer in the use of steel, di Suvero has created vibrant and dynamic works of sculpture and painting throughout his sixty-year career, fusing vitality and movement with complex construction on a monumental scale. Di Suvero began showing his sculpture in the late 1950's and is one of the most important American artists to emerge from the Abstract Expressionist era. His primary tools are the crane, the cherry picker, and cutting and welding torches. The artist usually does minimal preparatory drawings, preferring instead to improvise as he constructs. This approach is born out in the work which often takes on a playful and energetic character in spite of the extreme weight of the materials.
In addition to his artistic practice, Mark di Suvero is a lifelong activist for peace and social justice and has demonstrated a generous commitment to helping other artists. In 1962, he co-founded Park Place Gallery, the first artists' cooperative in New York City. In 1977, he established the Athena Foundation to assist artists to realize their ambitions. In 1986, he established Socrates Sculpture Park at the site of a landfill on the East River in Queens, New York. Through his leadership, a 4.5-acre parcel was transformed by a coalition of artists and community members into an open studio and exhibition space. To date, the park has hosted the work of over 900 artists.
Di Suvero received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center in 2000 and the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities in 2005. In 2010, di Suvero was a recipient of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal, as well as the National Medal of the Arts. In 2013, di Suvero received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Sculpture. His work is in over 100 museums and public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and Storm King Art Center where he has had four major exhibitions. He is also one of the most prolific artists working in public sculpture worldwide, having exhibited his bold architectural-scale public sculptures in the United States, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom among others.
Di Suvero lives and works in New York.
