Linda Smith: Power & Pattern
October 15 – November 12, 2022
bG Gallery, Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., #A2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
(310) 906-4211 | info@bgartdealings.com
www.bGArtGalleries.com
Hours: 12:00-5:00pm, Tuesday – Saturday
Artist Q&A with Shana Nys Dambrot: Saturday, November 5, 2022, 4pm-5pm, Post talk reception 5-7pm
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 serigraphs, hand-made ceramic pieces, mosaics, and a new series of monumental 7-foot totems that tower ceramic elements with an internal steel rod. The show 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, 4pm followed by a post talk reception 5-7pm.
LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 7, 2022: Artist Linda Smith is a native New Yorker who has lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years. 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 graduate Film Program. Right after that, she headed to the west coast and initially established her artistic identity as a painter. Her works were famously on view in Wolfgang Puck’s original Spago restaurant at the height of its notoriety, and were installed in all the street-facing 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.
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, Linda was the first artist – aside from Beatrice Wood – granted a solo exhibition at the Beatrice Wood Center for Art in Ojai, CA).
In the mid-1990s, Smith began experimenting with commercial tile and mosaics, and creating with clay, building an extensive body of representational ceramic work – at the same time connecting it to her painterly instinct and tradition. These anthropomorphic pieces of animals and humans are playful, thoughtful, fun, wise, and inviting of conversation.
Smith says, “I am more of a painter in my approach to sculpture. I paint with underglaze and glaze on simple shapes, whether they are cats, cups, dogs, figures, abstract creations or a tall totem. When I work with clay, I hand build with slabs. I fire the hand-built, dry clay work to bisque at a low fire cone 05. I paint on the bisqueware with commercial glazes. I love to explore with color, pattern, and shape, using my imagination. My electric Skutt kiln is computerized, and I can go to high fire cone 10, which I use for my totems.”
Smith’s latest series is her monumental totem sculptures, towering over seven-feet high. They will be installed in the center of the gallery, interspersed with her historical paintings and mosaic and ceramic works. Each hand-painted piece of the totems are connected with an internal architecture allowing them to stand tall and elevate the artist’s buoyant artistic vision.
Linda Smith’s work is in the permanent collection of these museums: Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama; The International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the American Museum of Ceramic Arts in Pomona, California, and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, California.
