4 September -
3 October 2009
200 Gertrude Street
200 Gertrude Street, FitzroyGertrude Contemporary Art Spaces was pleased to present a new exhibition featuring a selection of work by Brisbane-based artist Gemma Smith.
Smith’s vigorous and dynamic paintings and sculptures toy with pictorial depth and geometric abstraction and employ a radical exuberance of colour. Entanglement Factor featured a selection of work from across Smith’s corpus including work from her new series of paintings.
In these new smaller works Gemma built on ideas explored in her earlier chess-board works, presenting a pulsing, push-pull of gesturally applied colour. With vigorous confident mark making and vast, open backgrounds, these works presented an energy and vitality that could be read as a distillation of some of her colour field experiments in earlier geometric, abstract paintings. Exhibited alongside these paintings are her new sculptural ‘boulders’. Constructed from multi-coloured translucent acrylic, these crystalline monument-like sculptures reinterpreted her sculptural ‘adaptables’ – the plywood sculptures that can be reconfigured endlessly - forming and reforming new sculptural positions.
These gem-like ‘boulder’ works were solid and precious seeming, with their translucent coloured planes overlapping and mutating as the viewer circles the sculpture. Presented together these works revealed a heightened trust in the dynamics of colour. In these new works Smith loosened her grid, and freed a space for her colours to play out their own combinations and interactions, variously repelling and vibrating, creating new and unexpected correlations.
Gemma Smith’s work has been shown extensively throughout Australia, featuring in major group exhibitions including: Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, (2008); Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, (2008); Against the Amnesiac’s Life- style Showroom, (2006) Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne. Smith is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
