NYAB Event - Shinique Smith "Bold as love"

Shinique Smith "Bold as love"

James Cohan Gallery

This event has ended.

James Cohan Gallery presents Bold As Love, an exhibition of new works by Shinique Smith. This is the artist's debut exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.

Shinique Smith is inspired by the vast vocabulary of things we consume and discard. Examining the ways in which these objects resonate on a personal and social scale, Smith pursues the graceful and spiritual qualities of the written word and the everyday. In this new body of work, a free flow between paintings and sculptures ruminates on the interplay of chaos and restraint, balance and connection, and what is revealed and concealed.

In the exhibition Bold as Love, installations in each of the three gallery spaces trace a distinct phase of a conceptual journey. A central energizing motif throughout is the mandala, a form chosen for its geometry, both sacred and mathematical, and as a tool for fusing the visceral with the cerebral. The front gallery serves as a place of transition, an antechamber where calm and intensity harmonize in denim painted with bleach and in relief. Paintings and sculptures in the main gallery are installed in pairs and larger groupings. The potential energy bound within Smith’s hanging sculptures finds its kinetic expression in the gestural texts of her canvases. Ratios of the human body are referenced by impressions of the artist’s form both on large-scale paintings and in sculptures, stuffed and created from her own dresses. The exhibition culminates in the back gallery with an immersive environment featuring clustered hanging sculptures whose tethers drape to the floor in spiraling script.

Shinique Smith lives and works in Hudson, NY. Past solo exhibitions include MoCA, North Miami, Madison MCA, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Boulder MCA. The artist’s work is included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst others. She was a fellow of Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2008 and Skowhegan School in 2003.

[Image: Shinique Smith "No Key, No Question" (2013) mixed media on canvas (detail)]

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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