Anj Smith: Paintings

Anj Smith’s eerie and luminous paintings are exercises in extravagant meticulousness. The magic of her figures and motifs, however, derives in large part from the contrast Smith creates in surrounding areas of thickly applied impasto. This formal incongruence between the intricate and the inchoate is crucial to Smith’s work and suggests that she seeks to navigate a murky psychological space far beyond the reach of her brush. In her world, certainty is just a vestige of the past, with everything today existing in a fragile instability.