Richard Smith. Shaped Canvases. 1966-1972.

About

An exhibition of shaped canavses made by the British artist Richard Smith (1931-2016), an artist who defies easy categorisation. Known as one of the fathers of Pop art, in his Tate retrospective in 1975 he was described by critic Barbara Rose as ‘at once in and out of touch with the currents of the mainstream’.

‘The making of paintings has always been a subject in my work and with the shaping of the canvas this subject became more obvious and in some ways primary… The shape is an aspect of colour, the distortion of the canvas membrane alters the way the colour can be seen – also, the contour makes a varied absorbency, and therefore the canvas holds the colour in a specific way…’

Richard Smith 1968