Saturday, July 16, 2011

Kimber Smith: The Winged Life @ James Graham & Sons


Friday the Fourteenth, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 68 in.

From the James Graham & Sons press release:

"The painter Kimber Smith (American 1922-1981) was a prominent member of the group of American painters and poets who later became known as the second generation Abstract Expressionists and the New York School. As with many of this generation, for instance Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe or Sam Francis, Smith's mature style began developing during his formative years in Paris.
Smith was ahead of his time in his ability to consider the whole canvas with every brushstroke and his early use of large simple geometric shapes. These tendencies align him more with Color Field painters such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, save one distinguishing characteristic. Smith kept a hands-on approach closer to Expressionism, using a variety of increasingly washy primary colored passages married to notational jottings with paint tubes or crayons.
Seemingly reductive, like the later group of painters who collected under the rubric Lyrical Abstraction, Smith's paintings have a deep commitment to their content, which often refer to the quotidian elements cast with almost sacred dedication, and a poeticism more in line with the Symbolists and Post-Impressionists such as Redon or Bonnard."



Installation view

Red Smiles, 1973 and Untitled, 1973

Untitled, 1973 and Untitled, 1973

Installation view.

Untitled, 1973, gouache on paper, 24 x 18 in.

Installation view.

Carnival, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 55 in.

Untitled, 1975, gouache on paper, 19 x 15.5 in.

Installation view.

Untitled, 1973, gouache on paper, 24 x 18 in.

Back From G H, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 31 x 21 in.

The Magic Flute, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 36 in.

Und Zen, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 72 in.

Egyptian Rose Garden, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 65 in.

Installation view.

Installation view.


5 comments:

Debu Barve said...

Hi Paul,

Thank you for sharing these pictures.

~Debu

Paul Behnke said...

You're welcome Debu.

Anne Russinof said...

I'm so glad to have all these pictures. Saw the show early on and was delighted, but minus the
camera. Thanks!

Paul Behnke said...

I really liked this show too.
Was very glad to get a chance to see his work.

Terry Greene said...

What wonderful paintings! Such stunning, fresh and direct works that look as if they could have been painted within recent years.