Tony Smith: Distilled Expression

Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to present a solo show of sculpture and painting by Tony Smith, architect, sculptor, painter and theoretician, and one of the most original and influential figures in American art.
 
Timed to coincide with the Barnett Newman retrospective at Tate Modern, this show will highlight the parallel concerns between Smith and Newman. While Smith’s influence on Minimalism is well-known, Smith was actually part of the older, Abstract Expressionism generation and joined them in his pursuit of the sublime without reference to the real world. Born in New Jersey in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock, Smith counted Pollock, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko as close friends, and was particularly close to Barnett Newman.
 
Smith and Newman first worked together not as artists, but as architect and curator for the first exhibition of the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946. Although Newman achieved commercial success as an artist well before Smith, both shared an academic attitude to the artworld and had few exhibitions in their lifetimes in comparison to Pollock. Although Tony Smith was continuously painting and making sculpture from the Thirties, it was as a private and experimental pursuit. Smith only exhibited his first sculptural work in 1964. This was the plywood model of ‘The Elevens Are Up’, 1963, in one of the pivotal exhibitions of the minimalist movement ‘Black White and Gray’.
 
Both Newman and Smith approached abstraction as a spiritual exercise. To the modernist doctrine ‘Form follows function, function follows principle’, the Irish Catholic Smith added ‘I got the principle from God, I got the form from Christ, I got the function from the Spirit’. However, while Newman’s work was an almost sacred event separate from his everyday life, Tony Smith’s works draw on the everyday. Smith’s sculptures are based on a modular building system, an interest that began as a trained architect, working under Frank Lloyd Wright.
 
‘The Keys to the Given’, 1965, began as an plan for a house: ‘Frank Lloyd Wright had wrapped up space and turned around it, but he had never done it in the same way in all directions, or according to a strict measure. I made a schematic drawing: nothing came out of the house, but I decided to make a model based on the sketch. When I turned the model upside down, I was astonished to see that it didn’t fall over’.
 
The central work of this exhibition will be the monumental  ‘For W.A.’ from 1969. This sculpture was originally conceived as part of the ‘For…’ series dedication to the friends indicated by the initials. Although ‘For W.A.’ is formally simple, the two identical vertical masses placed side by side, are impossible to visually or mentally comprehend as a whole. This visual trickery is typical of Smith, while his playful and suggestive titles also undermine the formal appearance of the work.
This exhibition will also draw together a selection of key small-scale sculptures such as ‘The Elevens Are Up’ and ‘Playground’, plus an important painting from 1961.