Artist Linda Smith is a native New Yorker who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1977. The great museums of New York City were the formative crucible for her creative imagination. Smith received her BFA in painting from SUNY Buffalo, and earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Film & TV program. After moving to the west coast, she started exhibiting her paintings in galleries. Her works were also famously on view in Wolfgang Puck’s original Spago restaurant at the height of its notoriety, and were installed in all the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills in 1985 and 1993. Pop culture resonance notwithstanding, Smith engaged in a serious studio practice that has created a diverse, multimedia body of work spanning five decades.
Presented by bG Gallery at Bergamot Station, Smith’s solo show “Power and Pattern” is a survey exhibition encompassing works from 1980 through the present. Included are paintings – many not previously shown – serigraphs, mosaics, and hand-built ceramic sculptures, including a new series of monumental 6-foot-tall totems, each created with a steel base and rod.
The show opens with an artist’s reception on Saturday, October 15 from 6-9PM, and runs through November 12. There will be an artist Q&A conducted by art critic and LA Weekly arts editor Shana Nys Dambrot on Saturday, November 5 (time TBD).
The power in Smith’s work is her celebration of life and its pleasures, and an affirmation of the feminine spirit and world view. The pattern is the integral utilization of orchestrated colors, marks, and shapes as a basis for her figural images. She says, “My work is inspired by my daily life, a mix of relationships with people, cats, and dogs, along with inspiration from art history from the early Greeks to more contemporary art. I am really influenced by Picasso, Leger, Chagall and Matisse, and of course Viola Frey, Beatrice Wood, Robert Arneson and the Funk movement up in Northern California” (in 2006, Smith was the first artist to have a solo show at the Logan House at The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai, CA).
It was in the mid-1990s that Smith began experimenting with commercial tile and mosaics. Soon after, she began working with clay, building an extensive body of figurative ceramic work, always staying connected to her painterly instincts and tradition. These anthropomorphic pieces of animals and humans are playful, thoughtful, fun, wise, and inviting of conversation.
http://lindasmithceramicsplus.net/index.html
