Exhibition
Teacher's Pet | Dillwyn Smith
28 Feb 2018 – 12 May 2018
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 17:00
Address
- 11 Church Street
- London
- NW8 8EE
- United Kingdom
Teacher’s Pet is a result of a long journey experimenting with materials, pigments, colour and light.
About
Teacher’s Pet is a result of a long journey experimenting with materials, pigments, colour and light. His recent oeuvre broadly belongs to the realm of colour field abstraction. Yet Smith has developed a distinctly organic and sensual manner more connected to the spiritually charged surfaces of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko than the tradition of the British colour field painters.
In his Placebo series, Smith has given preference to the pure properties of textiles over painting on canvas or the cut and re-stitched canvases from his previous gallery exhibition Dirty Linen. Smith uses the “language of painting” by juxtaposing asymmetrical stretched pieces of nylon and Dishdasha cloth, held in place with machine stitching. Instead of the colour being applied, it is the colour embedded in the fabric that defines the composition and its mood. The fabrics possess great luminescence thanks to the light susceptibility of the thin tissues and the permeability of semi-transparent fabrics that absorb the light moving across the textiles, bringing the colours to life. The works expand beyond their borders, an effect reinforced by the visibility of the wooden stretchers that reveal a more physical level of the kaleidoscopic composition and connect it to the space they are in. A sense of gravity arises from the works that redefines the relationship between the viewer, the art work and the world beyond.