Ali Smith

Gallery Affiliations: Mark Moore Gallery

Region: Pacific Coast

My recent paintings evoke multilayered maps, wastelands, and invented landscapes, using patterning, ornamentation, and dramatic scale shifts that envelope the viewer. Each large-scale painting holds together as a complex unit, simultaneously built, constructed, woven, and/or erased, to create a tangible experience in paint.

Often drawing from studies on paper and collages, I might have an image or idea in my mind that is fleeting, and my paintings are an attempt to try to capture that image—they might turn into something else entirely, which creates energy and tension in the work.

I tend to work in groups of paintings rather than series, and each painting takes on its own identity. My paintings are an attempt to sort through the visual and cultural clutter I encounter daily, and make sense of it. Interested in the Rococo, early abstraction, and surrealism, I delight in both the plasticity and limitations of paint—a happy challenge.