Clive Smith

MARC STRAUS is pleased to present Clive Smith’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Smith is originally from Great Britain and initially trained as a portrait painter in New York.

For the past few years, he’s been fascinated by the idea of genetically engineering extinct species to recreate them. As a result, his recent work is based on the concept of de-extinction, where Smith conceives of his own imaginary species by merging the sensibility of famous art masterpieces and visually compatible species. The results are captivatingly beautiful paintings of these extraordinary fictional subspecies both on stretched canvases and on old canvas bound books of art history and zoology.

He has mostly focused on imagined new species of birds: owls, ducks, spoonbills, pelicans, kingfishers, and pigeons, but occasionally an insect or a mammal makes an appearance as well. He gives his creatures new feathers and fur patterns, based on canonical masters like Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Hilma of Klimt, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Kenneth Noland, Josef Albers, and Mark Rothko.

On Richter Pigeon (Colomba haus sohl) the German master Gerhard Richter’s blurred 1972 landscape painting is seen blended with a pigeon, a species that has been used by humans for racing and for carrying messages for centuries, including the two world wars. Roles and places are reversed. We easily recall the image of a bird in a landscape but how often do we see the landscape being the part of the bird? The blurriness of the source image is carried over to the bird.

The painted books offer additional layers of both visual marvel and concepts. On the first three to four pages inside the book, Smith makes notes, sketches, and collages determining what the new creatures will look like, before he paints them on the covers. He completes the art works with brass plaques displaying their new common and scientific names, to mimic natural history museum displays.

Painting with reverence and virtuosity, Smith invites us to consider the spectacular textures only a painting can offer. These paintings make us think about how we value the handmade, what is beautiful, what is enduring, and what is transient.

Smith (b. 1967, 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.