Artist: LUCIEN SMITH

Lucien Smith was born in Los Angeles, California in 1989. He graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union, New York in 2011. He continues to live and work in NY. Smith’s art explores various processes of painterly abstraction. Smith creates work that traverses a spectrum of styles and concerns, from chance to purpose, spare to saturated, sublime to familiar. These visual approaches, or conceptual directives, may combine and overlap in one piece, or spread individually through a body of work – each idea originally segregated, fully integrates when understood as an oeuvre. His work acts as a tangible moment, a chronicle of exploration, as he negotiates with existence. He reminds us that an artist’s trajectory is a sensory reflection of individual experience. In a number of series, Smith has captured memories of the natural world. His Rain Paintings, an early series created in upstate New York with a paint-filled fire extinguisher, are elegant abstractions of the weather. While in Tigris, his most recent body of work, Smith’s interest in nature has evolved to include loose brushstrokes fluttering across canvases as if to evoke the movement of rivers. Named after an ancient body of water, the works in Tigris convey an organic sensibility. Smith’s process of pouring paint onto the canvas is reminiscent of pouring water, evoking the movement of rivers and rain. Since graduating, the twenty-five year old artist has had a number of solo shows in New York, California, and London. Exhibitions include Salon 94, The Susan Geiss Company, and Half Gallery in New York, OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles, Bill Brady in Kansas City, and Brand New Gallery in Milan.

 ~ skarstedt.com & Artsy