Overview
Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of British painter Richard Smith's most recent works. His career spans over six decades and his paintings still continue to challenge traditional categories, melding Pop Art and Abstraction.
Richard Smith was born in Hertfordshire in 1931 and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1959 Smith moved to New York City on a Harkness Fellowship, and his early works reference the vivacious energy of American advertising and consumer culture. Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Smith experimented with the structure of stretched canvas by building large-scale frames that expanded into three
dimensions. Smith exhibited as the official British artist at the 1970 Venice Biennale and then took his work in a new direction, this time taking the canvas off its wooden stretchers and adding aluminum rods at tilted axes to create a layered effect. Smith hung strings, often tied in knots, from the edges of these pieces and they became known as his "kite" paintings.
Today his work is minimal and more contained. Rather than testing the boundaries of the canvas with three dimensional pieces, Smith now has turned this exploration inward-creating painted frames within the plane of the canvas. This latest collection of works maintains Smith's iconic vibrancy and high-key color, but comes to a place of serenity.
