Clive Smith

Clive Smith is a highly trained British painter interested in how contemporary painting can speak to modern societal issues.

For two decades Smith primarily focused on portraits, including self-portraits. Much like Lucian Freud, these paintings capture the emotional density of the sitter. Now in his recent work, Smith focusses on his research into advances within genomic technology, specifically the studies scientists were conducting with endangered species. These molecular biologists had set themselves the goal of re-engineering previously extinct species and returning them to life. Smith now blends various species with paintings, thus, altering their DNA, to become a new, extraordinary subspecies.

In another new series of paintings, Smith ruminates on the insatiable demand of modern consumer culture. As an effect of mass industrialization, we often discard broken, disposable things and replace them with the next design trend. This unintentionally contributes to pollution.

Referencing the Japanese art of Kintsugi – repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver to highlight the breakage – Smith is interested in how breakage and repair becomes part of the object’s history and dignity, and is viewed as beautiful. By breaking a plate and gluing it back together, Smith found accidental “ready made” broken lines to work around and within. Approaching each plate as he would a portrait painting, and bestowing it with personality like hard-worn wrinkles through the luscious application of paint, Smith blurs the lines between realism and abstraction, Fine Art and Applied Art.

Smith presents an unapologetic and authentic presence of these objects with exquisite mastery. They make us think about how we value the hand made, what is art, what is beautiful, what is enduring and what is transient.

Smith (b. 1967, St. Albans, England) lives and works in New York. In 1999 he won First Prize, BP Portrait Award, at London’s National Portrait Gallery. He has had numerous museum exhibitions that include the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK. His work is in many public collections such as in the Cleveland Museum of Art, US; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, KC, US; and the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.