David Hare grew up in New York and worked as a commercial photographer for several years. During the 1940s, he became involved with a group of surrealists who had fled European fascism, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Hare adopted the surrealist idea of free association, producing streams of words or drawings without thinking about them and discovering new connections between unrelated ideas. Hare was intrigued by the way line and form could define space. In his welded sculptures he combined abstract shapes with elements inspired by nature to explore the relationships between positive and negative space.