Starting on Thursday, Sept. 17 through Jan. 16, 2027,  Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood will present Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964, an exhibition devoted to his pioneering Sprays, seldom-seen two-dimensional works that embody the artist’s gift for daring innovations of form and color, space and time, in every medium he chose.

Though he initially trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, much of Smith’s education took place on the factory floors of automobile and locomotive plants, where he acquired a hands-on mastery of metal. That perspective would redefine the cultural and material possibilities of sculpture over his 33-year career.

 As he assembled metal components on whitewashed sections of his shop floor, his welding process left scorched silhouettes on the ground. Recognizing new artistic possibility in these traces, he began 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. He would often return to the compositions with white paint to heighten contrast and sharpen the interplay of elements. 

David Smith Spray Paintings,

Courtesy MASH Gallery

On view from Saturday, Sept. 26 through Saturday, Oct. 24, the Mash Gallery will present The Shape of Elsewhere, a group exhibition featuring Rachel Berkowitz, Mark Engel, David Gordon, John Grande, Haleh Mashian, Mike O’Guinn, Brigitte Puschmann, and Itaewon.

Moving across painting, collage, abstraction, figuration, street art, and fused glass, the Shape of Elsewhere enters a world where the recognizable becomes expansive. Bodies, landscapes, architecture, natural elements, and cultural imagery become starting points for experiences shaped by imagination and transformation.

Rooted in the early twentieth-century Surrealist movement’s interest in the unconscious and the liberation of imagination from rational constraints, the element of the surreal within the exhibit merges into a fluid mode of perception. Familiar forms move beyond their expected contexts and reorganize through altered scale, layered space, and surprising material relationships.