Cupid Triumphant, 2022
White Carrara marble on stone pedestal
Sculpture dimensions: 49 x 43 x 29 in.

On view on the Foreland Sculpture Pad

Images courtesy of Alon Koppel

Standing, or resting, at one cubic meter each, Smith’s sculptures are at first glance both instinctively recognizable and bizarrely different – it’s as though the canon of classical statuary has been put through a trash compactor. The artist – working with a team of master carvers, a seven-axis reductive robot, and the digital research teams at museums like the Uffizi – has rendered some of the greatest hits of Hellenic sculpture in 3D modeling programs, before compressing each of them into a compact cube, painstakingly chiseled out of a Carrara marble block. The ancient stone draws a material through-line between the sculpture Smith has chosen for his antic homage – Apollo of Belvedere, Cupid Triumphant, Bernini’s David, and others – the better to defamiliarize these paradigmatic works as they appear before the viewer, radically reshaped.