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For Immediate Release: Richard Smith Paintings at Jay Grimm Gallery, Chelsea
The exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Smith’s first New York solo show at the Green Gallery, which was founded by Richard Bellamy. Smith’s career has included winning the Grand Prize at the 1967 Sao Paulo Biennale, representing Britain at the 1970 Venice Biennale, a 1975 retrospective at the Tate Gallery, a solo show at the Walker Art Center in 1979. Smith was also represented in the important Royal Academy show, “Pop Art” in 1991, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. He last showed in New York at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1995. Over next winter, the Tate Britain will have a room of Richard Smith’s work drawn from its collection as part of a survey of British art from 1500 to the present. He also will have an exhibition opening next October at the Flowers East Gallery, London. Smith graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 1957, a classmate of Peter Blake. He traveled to New York on a grant in 1959, where he came into contact with the Coenties Slip circle of James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly. After teaching positions in Colorado and California, Smith spent several years in the west of England. He moved to New York permanently in 1978. Throughout his career, Smith has created painterly works that acknowledge the impact of consumerist imagery on high visual art. As such, he has been recognized as an early contributor to Pop Art, as well as to Post Painterly Abstraction. Smith’s current work advances this dialog with abstraction. These paintings combine formalist concerns with the grid and the play between hard and soft edges with a fresh, quirky sense of color and design. This unexpected combination is done with an unpretentious confidence that allows the work to achieve a delicate balance between traditional modernist painting and material culture.
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