White Room: Matthew Smith
January 10–February 16, 2008
White Columns is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition by the London-based artist Matthew Smith. For his White Room exhibition Smith will present a discrete ensemble of five new works: a grid like arrangement of painted shelving brackets, two mirror paintings, and two sculptural works created from domestic towels and bedding. Working at the margins of both painting and sculpture, Smith’s works set up both formal and poetic tensions between (found) materials, materiality, gesture, and process. Working in a tradition of post-minimalism – the work of artists such as Blinky Palermo, Franz Erhard Walther, or France’s ‘Supports/ Surfaces’ group come to mind – Smith’s work might be understood as part of an ongoing, and continually unraveling interrogation of late-modernist abstraction, evident also in the work of more recent artists such as Richard Aldrich, Hayley Tompkins, and Mitzi Pederson amongst others.
Matthew Smith lives and works in London. He received an MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in 2005, and a BA from Sheffield Hallam University in 2003. Prior to his art education he studied and received a BA in Sociology in 1998. White Columns initially encountered his work in a 2006 solo show at Associates, a year-long artist-run gallery in London’s East End initiated by artist Ryan Gander. He has subsequently had a solo show at London’s STORE Gallery (2007.) His work has been included in the ‘New Contemporaries’ exhibition (Liverpool & London, 2006), and in the EAST International (Norwich Gallery, Norwich, England, 2007) – selected by White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs and artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz.
Matthew Smith’s White Room is generously supported by the BRITISH COUNCIL.
