metal art has been around for many centuries the most obvious being the coin. coins have been used for thousands of years till current date. The different carvings, indentations and images portrayed on the coins are mini works of art.
metal is such an interesting material to use for art, depending on the metal used you can manipulate it in many ways. It’s also the most expensive inexpensive material in my opinions as so much everyday materials are made from metals and can be easily recycled into a piece of work.But metal can come just as expensive as cars especially if an artist is looking to use a large quantity of a certain type of metal.
david smith
the first artist i looked into was David Smith, He was an American artist who painted but was more known for his abstracted metal sculptures. he would describe it as drawing with metals. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/david-smith-1953 -if you want to find out more)
His work was very structural and geometric he would create figurative shapes and lines. He would mostly work on ones that look like the ones shown on the right. He would leave a lot of negative space and have it quite rounded and he wold achieve this by working with metals that were malleable and bend and manipulate the metals to create these abstract pieces. quite literally he would also make the exact opposite of this where as shown in the first picture he would use more angular shapes with little to no negative spaces. This piece was actually featured in the TATE.
el anatsui
the last form of using metal as art is by Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist living in Nigeria. He creates his work by recycling cans and manipulating the shape.This method behind creating these pieces is by flattening cans of all different colours and then carefully and sternly attaching them to one and other to then create this large piece of connected cans that act and mimic the fluidity that fabrics have. The bursts of colour and the different patterns create this abstracted overall piece and brings more to the feel of it not looking like its made out of metal at all.
I find this to be a very smart and imaginative way of creating magnificent pieces from what was essentially rubbish in the beginning. This method can ben done alone and a lot of his work has solely been done independently but it usually requires many people to partake as it is very time consuming. Each person would make a section then once completed Anatsui aslong side everyone else would pieces together and play around with patterns, colours and shapes before then attaching them all together.