Paintings
Anj Smith
104 pages | 40 colour plates
24 cm x 33 cm
Printed paper hardcover with UV varnish highlight
MACK, 2013

 

The eerie, luminous, compact portraits and landscapes of London-based artist Anj Smith are exercises in extravagant meticulousness. The magic of her laboriously depicted figures and motifs, however, derives in large part from the contrast Smith creates in surrounding areas of loamy, thickly applied impasto. This formal incongruence – between the intricate and the inchoate, between a jewel-like glow and rough scratchings, between filigree and mire – is crucial to Smith’s work. It suggests that she seeks to navigate a murky psychological space far beyond the reach of her virtuosic single-bristle brush. In her world, certainty is just a vestige of the past, with everything today existing in a fragile, constantly shifting instability.

http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/59-Paintings.html