“MULTIPARTS” LEON POLK SMITH AT LISSON GALLERY LONDON
This exhibition celebrates one of the founders of the hard-edge style of Minimalism, Leon Polk Smith. Following Lisson Gallery’s first exhibition in New York with the Leon Polk Smith Foundation last year (8 September – 21 October 2017), this show will feature eight multipartite canvases and a large freestanding screen, focusing on a period from 1965 to the early 1970s.
As the first major presentation of his work in the UK, this exhibition will introduce local audiences to the abstract multipart canvases of this still under-appreciated American artist.
Of Native American descent, Smith was born outside the Cherokee territory of Chickasha a year before it was incorporated into the state of Oklahoma, which joined the United States in 1907.
He moved to New York in 1936 to study and in the early 1940s there he encountered the work of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and came to know Hilla Rebay, director of the fledgling Museum of Non-Objective Art. Smith embraced Mondrian’s defined Neoplastic arrangements, but soon relaxed the grid through the use of soft curves and by employing circular canvases.
While the mid-century American art world was focused on Abstract Expressionism, Smith subverted the prevailing orthodoxies and invented his own visual vocabulary, first gaining prominence in the late 1950s with his distinctive shaped canvas series, titled the Correspondences. Balancing formal and rational elements with contemporary abstraction, Smith distilled his own experiences into pure, geometric forms, becoming synonymous with the post-war, hard-edged school of Minimalism.
The exhibition at Lisson Gallery will bring together a range of works from the holdings of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation, largely from the late ’60s and early ’70s, and many seen publicly for the first time. Four of the works in the exhibition are from Smith’s Constellation series. These clusters of smaller canvases highlight Smith’s astute geometric abstraction, dynamic form, and brilliant use of colour. Each painting has a distinct identity.
Constellation Y (1968), for example is defined by its static, Y-shaped form – three unified elements combining to form one structured object; yet the shapes that make up Red Circle Blue Square (1968) are more curvilinear and unhinged, pushing at the boundaries of the edges and the canvas itself.
Equally, works such as Constellation V (1968) appear as if in internal dialogue, the colours and forms in playful movement. The centrepiece of the exhibition will be Smith’s largest painting, the double-sided screen Seven Involvements in One/Correspondence Red White (1966) which was last seen publicly in 1996 at the Brooklyn Museum retrospective of his work, titled ‘Leon Polk Smith: American Painter’.
LEON POLK SMITH
Lisson Gallery
London
Through 15 January 2016
lissongallery.com
.
.
READ MORE FROM ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
- JAMES TURRELL AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY Enjoy Light of the Presence, at Gagosian Gallery Athens, a pairing of two works from Glass Series (2001–) by James Turrell, Knowing Light (2007) and Rounded Up (2024). A poetic and inspiring ode to nature and its elements. Since the 1960s, Turrell has been exploring perceptual…
- COLORFUL SPHERES & EMOTIVE INTUITION - PAINTINGS BY ZHANG ENLI Zhang Enli emerged onto the art scene in the 1990s when he was most associated with symbolic, figurative paintings. Following this, he embarked on a series of quotidian objects treated sensitively and beautifully – whether containers, wires or hoses –…
- SUE WILLIAMS Since beginning her career in the 1980’s, Williams’ oeuvre can be defined, in part, by its transition from boldly narrative and satirical, cartoon-like paintings exploring themes of feminism, violence, and inequality, to all-over compositions of brightly colored semi-abstractions, retaining the…