Art News

States of Fragility: A solo exhibition by Anj Smith at Ibid Projects

LONDON.- For her third solo exhibition at IBID PROJECTS, Anj Smith presents a series of eight new paintings to be shown for the first time. Each work is located between representations of portrait, landscape and still life painting, often encompassing or rejecting elements of all three. This collapsing of simultaneous ideas and phenomena is intrinsic to these paintings, where narratives are as complex and layered as the application of paint and where objects disintegrate into chaotic rubble or reconfigure to acquire brand new and bewildering meanings. Differing states of time, place and different psychological spaces overlap in these works, as do the types of painting, with luminous jewel-toned colour banks as likely to exist against crude slabs of impasto, scratched barren areas or zones of almost pornographic attention to the minute. Smith has said: “There’s definitely no literal or singular narrative in any of the pai