San Francisco, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the City College of San Francisco from 1953 to 1954.
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1954 to 1955.
Berkeley, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the University of California, Berkeley from 1955 to 1957.
Mark di Suvero, finishing his sculpture "Pyramidian", 1998
Saint Louis, Missouri, United States
Mark di Suvero with his sculpture "For Rilke" in 1981.
San Francisco, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the City College of San Francisco from 1953 to 1954.
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1954 to 1955.
Berkeley, California, United States
Mark di Suvero studied at the University of California, Berkeley from 1955 to 1957.
Mark di Suvero, finishing his sculpture "Pyramidian", 1998
Saint Louis, Missouri, United States
Mark di Suvero with his sculpture "For Rilke" in 1981.
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Mark di Suvero was born on September 18, 1933, in Shanghai, China. He is one of four children of Matilde Millo and Vittorio di Suvero, an Italian descent. He lived in China until the beginning of World War II, when his family found refuge in San Francisco.
Di Suvero attended San Francisco City College from 1953 to 1954 before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara (1954 - 1955), and received a B.A. degree in philosophy from Berkeley in 1957.
In 1957 Mark di Suvero moved to New York, where he became an important figure in the avant-garde Green and Park Place galleries. Since the 1960's he has lived in California and New York, but spent the years 1970-1975 in Europe as a protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Among di Suvero's early works is a series of large wood sculpture that combine boards, beams, chains, ropes, and other "found" objects in multidirectional compositions with sharp perspectival shifts. A series of cast bronze hands (1959 - 1964), agonized, stretching, pointing, seem to be in the expressionist tradition of Rodin, but are also images of the juncture and reaching gesture that characterizes all di Suvero's work. Smaller works of this period, made up of chunks of wood and bent steel, counterpoise motion and stasis, weight and weightlessness, small and large scale.
In 1965 di Suvero began to evolve the outdoor sculptures on a heroic scale for which he is best known, at first using huge timbers and metal struts in triangulated compositions put together on a beach in northern California. These led to increasingly sophisticated structures composed almost entirely of I-beams. In these monumental works, constructed by the artist himself with cranes and other construction machinery, di Suvero is the worker-sculptor in the tradition of David Smith, a collagist on an epic scale, drawing on the raw materials of industrial civilization. Gigantic elements balance and swing on the structures of defiance of their ponderousness. At the same time these works humanize the landscape. Most of them are open to climbing, sliding, and swinging in defiance of the inaccessibility of art.
Di Suvero came to public prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, the first for any living artist, and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which featured his large-scale sculpture in public sites through all five boroughs of the city.
Mark di Suvero is one of the most important sculptors of his generation. His works are important to the development of modern sculpture through his tendency to include kinetic or moving elements in them.
He has shown widely throughout the world and has had major one-man exhibitions in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (1972); the Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum, Duisburg, West Germany 1972; Chalon-sur-Sâone, Chalon-sur-Saone, France (1972 - 1974); the Jadin des Tuileries, Paris (1975); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1975 - 1976).
In 1977, Di Suvero founded the Athena Foundation with Anita Contini to award grants to artists. He was the founder of Socrates Sculpture Park (SSP) in 1985, and continues to serve as chairman of its board of trustees.
Mark di Suvero is a politically committed artist. In 1966 he designed the fifty-five-foot-high "Peace Tower" (now destroyed) in Los Angeles as a protest against the war in Vietnam.
Quotations:
"I'm a constructivist... symbolical constructs - like language, like mathematics, like art - are the things that change people's minds. They are where we grow."
"I hope to make the space come alive. There's a time when a piece of sculpture stands up, becomes itself and there's no way to describe what I feel like - it's poetry."
"The idea of direct work has disappeared right now. It's computers. I'm so far linked to my hands."
"I don't like the word responsibility, but if you're working a crane - I am a union crane operator - you know very well that your responsibility isn't just to the steel that you're lifting but to the lives of co-workers who depend on you doing the right thing."
Mark di Suvero was married to architect Maria Teresa Caparrotta, whom he met while living in Italy, but later divorced. In 1993 he married Kate D. Levin. They have a daughter.
