Someone tell dealers James and Jane Cohan to take a relaxing day off. Their VIP Art Fair 2.0 is taking place at the moment, but they still found time to mail a news release saying that they will now work with New York artist Shinique Smith, who previously showed in New York with Yvon Lambert. (Lambert shuttered its Chelsea branch last year, but still represents Ms. Smith in Paris.)
Here’s the James Cohan Gallery on the artist’s work:
“In works made from the class of objects we call ‘belongings,’ Smith collides the intractable hard geometry and hard thinking that defines urban existence—what Paul D. Miller called ‘cubes of consciousness’ in a 2010 catalogue essay—with the softening, emotionally steeped influence of the worn-down, nostalgic or forgotten.”
Ms. Smith is perhaps best known for assemblages that she makes out of brightly colored pieces of found fabric, which she binds or ties together, working them into unusual shapes that she hangs from ceilings, spans across walls or deposits on the floor. She paints, too, in a virtuosic gestural style, often directly on the walls of her installations.
Ms. Smith has had one-person shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, in Normal, Ill. and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. If you’re in the mood to see her work right now, you can head over to the VIP Art Fair, where her Milan gallery, Brand New, is showing one of her pieces.
