David Seccombe: Wall to Wall #25

After 43 years of working in the same West Village basement studio, what do you do when Sandy comes and wipes it all out? If you are David Seccombe, you paint on your dining room table, planning new pieces. You borrow time in a friend’s studio, cut out modular segments and make a wall-to-wall sculpture that looks like it was built in a big barn.

David says, “When you make a painting you use the whole format, from side to side; that’s what I do in sculpture.” His latest work, which spans the Project Room from side to side, is the third installation he has made for this site, but just one of the scores of drawings and elevations in his growing archive of ideas.

David Seccombe’s first sculpture exhibit, in 1961 at the Brata Gallery on 3rd Avenue and 10th Street, featured a large metal piece which hung from the ceiling. In the half-century since then, his work has been shown across the country and internationally, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, N.Y.F.A., the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and others.

A Westbeth “pioneer” he and his family moved in while the cement was still fresh on the stairway in their apartment. Many of his older pieces are familiar features of our courtyard landscape.