Hare, David

Hare, David (b New York, 10 Mar. 1917; d Jackson Hole, Wyo., 21 Dec. 1992).
American sculptor, painter, and photographer. He initially studied chemistry and had no formal training in art, which he approached as a form of experimentation. In the late 1930s he worked as a commercial photographer and in about 1940 he began to experiment with the technique of ‘heatage’ (gently heating the emulsion of a photographic plate so that it melted and the image flowed). His interest in this technique brought him into contact with the European Surrealists who had moved to New York during the Second World War, and Hare founded and edited the Surrealist magazine VVV, which ran from June 1942 to February 1944. In 1942 he began to make sculpture, using various materials and showing a typically Surrealist interest in visual puns. He was friendly with several leading Abstract Expressionist painters and his sculptures have been seen as three-dimensional analogues of their work. From 1948 to 1953 he lived in France. By the time he returned to New York he was working mainly in metal—welded or cast. In the 1960s he took up painting, but he returned to sculpture as his main medium in the 1970s.