David Smiths Spray Paintings Get Their Close-Up in West Hollywood
Hauser and Wirth devotes a full exhibition to the sculptors rare spray enamel works from 1958 to 1964, on view through mid-January.
David Smith is remembered as the sculptor who redefined what metal could do, but for a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s he was also one of the most daring painters in America. Hauser and Wirth West Hollywood is making the case with Night Window, an exhibition devoted entirely to his spray paintings, on view from September 17, 2026 through January 16, 2027.
The Sprays, as they are known, are seldom-seen works. Smith made them by arranging scraps of metal, paper and found materials on canvas, then coating the surface with commercial spray enamel, an industrial material with no precedent in fine art at the time. He would often return to the compositions with white paint to sharpen the contrast and the interplay of forms. The idea came from his own shop floor, where welding left scorched silhouettes on whitewashed sections and he recognized new artistic possibility in the traces.
He would often return to the compositions with white paint to sharpen the contrast.
Smith trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, but much of his real education happened on the factory floors of automobile and locomotive plants, where he learned metal inside and out. That industrial fluency shaped a 33-year career that moved freely between sculpture, drawing and painting as a single creative act.
An opening night conversation
The exhibition opened with a free talk pairing Carol S. Eliel, senior curator emerita of modern art at LACMA, with artist Mary Weatherford. It was a fitting match. Weatherford’s own work with sprayed pigment and industrial materials carries Smith’s restlessness forward by several generations.
If you go
Hauser and Wirth’s West Hollywood gallery is at 8980 Santa Monica Blvd. The show runs through January 16, 2027, so there is plenty of time, but the Sprays are rarely gathered in one place. Admission to the gallery is free. Street parking and nearby lots serve the area, and the gallery sits along one of West Hollywood’s main commercial corridors, an easy stop on a day of gallery hopping.
