M E D I A
Margaret-Anne Smith is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo and group exhibits over the last fifteen years include Irvine Fine Arts Center, SMC Barrett Gallery, Neutra Museum Gallery, Wilshire Ebell, Coburn School of Music, Studio Eleven Gallery, Art Share Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, HBO Gallery, Bonham’s and Butterfields, and Pharmaka, all in the Los Angeles area. Her work was featured in the film Molly’s Game, directed by Aaron Sorkin, and is in numerous private collections.
Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Smith attended art school and received a diploma in film production in South Africa before emigrating to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film editing. Since 2000, she has turned her visual creativity full-time to art and has studied with Corey D’Augustine and Tom Wudl. Other artists who have influenced Smith’s work include Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Sarah Oppenheimer, László Moholy-Nagy, the architect and structural engineer Otto Frei, and Uta Barth.
After a series of square oil paintings inspired by a sequence of poems written by the South African Resistance writer, Antjie Krog, Smith’s work has grown in size and in dimensions, incorporating painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage to intersect and inform each other, discovering new materials to better suit her needs, documenting her process, which becomes itself part of the body of work. An intrepid explorer of new mediums, her fastidious technique and craft always a beauty in itself, Smith’s latest work migrates from tabletop sculptures to large constructions to cut-and-painted stones in dialogue with each other. Too heavy to lift or too large to hold, but counter-intuitively light as air, at once abstract and intimate, these works invite curiosity, engagement, wonder.
Andrea Carter Brown
Los Angeles, February 202
Antidote to Noise
Peter Frank: Discourse on Margaret-Anne Smith on the occasion of Antidote to Noise
Margaret-Anne Smith’s work follows logically out of minimalism, but note that it follows out of minimalism, not into it, or in it. Smith’s work begins with form and elaborates upon that, and does so, particularly in her most recent work, in mathematical terms, specifically geometry and trigonometry… Linear and planar relationships in the most recent work are the generating concepts.
The work immediately preceding, … as can be seen in the imagery, is more, well, you might call it fractal in that regard, but it is more complex and dependent on irregular natural forms like stones. But in her most recent work Smith does away with references to the natural world and … posits that the natural world includes the pure, the theoretical and the hidden.
In a sense, Smith is working with the grid, ….most notably the recent work, does so most clearly… not in a direct way, not with the vertical horizontal coordinates on a single plane, but with a more complex concept of the grid, where the grid is a mapping field for point and line relationships, point and line and plane relationships. Her work in this regard harks back not to minimalism but to classic modernist geometric art, the work of Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, amplified by a conscious employment of mathematical relationships.
There is a great sensuosity to the work, but it resides in the work [itself], less in the material. The earliest work Smith displays in the show has that sensuousness because it is referencing the biological and geological qualities of the natural world. But the most recent work depends on theoretical and abstract and ideal aspects of natural occurrence rather than the everyday, … mundane aspects of natural formation.
Peter Frank
March 08, 2020