Mark di Suvero often works on an architectural scale, creating spatially dynamic sculptures largely from industrial I-beams, each weighing many tons. His primary tools are the crane, the cherry picker, and torches for cutting and welding. Di Suvero’s bold, open steel sculptures and the broad expanses of Storm King seem made for each other—together, they create a unique environment in which the dynamism of art and nature become mutually reinforcing. Storm King has presented four landmark exhibitions of di Suvero’s work throughout its history: a twenty-five-year retrospective of sculptures and drawings in 1985; a ten-year retrospective in 1995 and 1996; a unique exhibition highlighting di Suvero’s relationship with his longtime gallerist and friend Richard Bellamy in 2005 and 2006; and a major exhibition of twelve monumental outdoor works sited on Governors Island in New York in 2011 and 2012.

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 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which included a presentation of his large-scale sculpture at public sites across all five boroughs of the city. It was after the Whitney retrospective, in 1976, that a group of di Suvero’s outdoor works was first brought to Storm King, at the invitation of its then president, H. Peter Stern, becoming the first works to be sited in the South Fields. Storm King’s permanent collection now boasts an unrivaled group of six large-scale sculptures by the artist—E=MC²; Mahatma; Mon Père, Mon Père; Mother Peace; Mozart’s Birthday; and Pyramidian. 

Di Suvero is a politically committed artist. In 1966 he designed the fifty-five-foot-high Peace Tower (no longer extant) in Los Angeles as a protest against the war in Vietnam. Soon after, he left the United States for several years, in voluntary exile as an antiwar protest. Leaving North America in 1971, he traveled first to Venice, Italy, his father’s ancestral home, where he established a small painting and drawing studio, taught at the Università Internazionale dell’Arte, and collaborated with engineers to design a system of locks to prevent canal flooding. In 1972 he moved to Eindhoven, the Netherlands, working and living in a factory there. Shortly thereafter di Suvero relocated to the industrial French town of Chalon-sur-Saône, living until 1974 on a houseboat anchored next to a waterfront shipyard, where he used cranes and cherry pickers to create a series of large-scale sculptures, including Mon Père, Mon Père. 

In 1985 di Suvero turned an abandoned warehouse on the waterfront in Long Island City, across the East River from Manhattan, into a studio. Since that time many works, including E=MC², have become more visually complex, comprising a varied repertoire of flat circular shapes and acute angles. Standing at ninety-two feet, nine inches, E=MC² is di Suvero’s tallest sculpture to date, as well as the tallest work ever shown at Storm King. On the impact of the work, the artist has stated, “I think that as a piece, it is uplifting because it gives you the sense of the capacity to soar, to embrace space in an open way.” Forgoing preparatory drawing in favor of improvisation, di Suvero continues to invent new shapes, forms, and material combinations that enliven space, enrich experience, and convey poignant human emotion.