David Hare (March 10, 1917 – December 21, 1992) was an American artist associated with Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and American Figurative Expressionism. Born in New York City to an art collector mother and a lawyer father, Hare spent his youth in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. He studied biology and chemistry at Bard College from 1936 to 1937 but pursued no formal art training.

Hare began experimenting with color photography in the late 1930s, developing an automatist technique called "heatage"—heating photographic negatives to create distorted, abstract images. He gained early recognition with a solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1940 and a commission from the American Museum of Natural History to document the Pueblo Indians using the innovative dye transfer process.

In the 1940s, Hare became deeply involved with the Surrealist movement, particularly after connecting with European émigré artists like André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. He co-founded and edited the influential Surrealist journal VVV from 1942 to 1944. His work shifted toward sculpture, where he created welded-metal abstract forms that combined organic shapes with surreal, dreamlike qualities, exploring themes of desire, death, and the psyche.

He was a founding member of the Subjects of the Artist School in 1948 alongside Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and William Baziotes. His sculptures were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and later at the Guggenheim Museum, where a solo show of his Cronus series was held in 1977.

Though he worked in painting, photography, and printmaking throughout his life, Hare is best known for his welded-metal sculptures, which reflect both Surrealist automatism and a deep engagement with space and form. He lived in Victor, Idaho, and died in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1992 after an emergency operation for an aortic aneurysm.