David Hayes

Fulbright Award and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, David Hayes was a highly celebrated American artist best known for his large-scale, polychrome, metal sculptures. Influenced by nature and by an ‘indeterminable vocabulary or shapes and forms,’ from his everyday life, Hayes adapted each sculpture from a series of drawings which he then translated into small-scale models. Each shape was then carved from a large metal sheet using a burning torch, welded together, reinforced with gussets, primed and painted to form the final composition. Hayes’s objective was for the various organic shapes and colors comprising each work to interact with one another harmoniously and inspire ‘non-intellectual’ or emotional reactions.

Recipient of the Logan Prize for Sculpture from the National Institute of Art and Letters in 1965, Hayes’s work has been collected by prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.