Richard Smith

Richard Smith (1931-2016) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. After studying in the 1950s at the Royal College of Art, Smith stood apart from the Pop Art movement of the 1960s by combining imagery found in the commercial landscape with an expansive abstract painting language very much his own. He gained critical acclaim for extending the boundaries of painting into three dimensions, creating sculptural shaped canvases with monumental presence, and kite paintings which questioned painting’s edge and the relationship between canvas and support. Of these works, Barbara Rose said, “inevitably they echo the verticality of man’s own gravity-determined stance… These consistent allusions to the human condition prove that abstract art is not necessarily divorced from man’s experience.”