David Hare

David Hare (New York, 1917 – Jackson, Wyoming, 1992) was an American artist associated with Surrealism. He is best remembered for his sculpture, although he also worked extensively in photography and painting.

In the late 1930s, with no previous artistic training, he began experimenting with colour photography. Drawing on his earlier chemistry studies, he devised heatage, an automatist method in which he heated an unfixed negative so that the image wrinkled and distorted. In 1940 he received a commission from the American Museum of Natural History to document the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest.

Between 1941 and 1944 he co-founded and edited the Surrealist periodical VVV with André Breton, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Sculpture then became his main focus, and he exhibited at prestigious galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century. In 1948 he was a founding member, alongside Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, of the Subjects of the Artist School in New York.

During the 1960s and 1970s he taught at several schools, including the Philadelphia College of Art, and worked on the Cronus sculpture series. He died in Jackson in 1992, following emergency surgery for an aortic aneurysm.