Sold for: $10,000

PROVENANCE
Douglas Gallery, Vancouver, 1968
Private Collection, Vancouver
Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, January 31, 2019, Lot 222
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997, page 39

In 1966, Gordon Smith was reading books on colour theory by Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers. He began to paint and produce prints in a hard-edge geometric style. In this same period, other modernist artists in Vancouver such as Roy Kiyooka, Gary Lee-Nova, and Michael Morris were also painting in this manner. Smith’s canvases such as Grey Encounter had smooth surfaces, crisp lines and bright, vibrating colour. His juxtaposition of precise colour shapes produced interesting optical illusions – such as with the bright turquoise rectangles which read across in a row in the same plane, while the thinner ones also pop backwards because they are crossed by the undulating pale grey lines. Smith commented about these paintings that “It could be just a temporary reaction against emotion in painting. It’s pretty painting – architecturally pleasant – and very satisfying to do…I am doing it just to please myself and not to go along with the critics.”

In 1967, Smith collaborated with landscape architect Cordelia Oberlander in a project for Expo 67 – a children’s playground which incorporated Op Art play walls. Also, in 1970 he worked with architect Arthur Erickson in the design of the Canadian Pavilion in Osaka, Japan, providing a colour scheme for Erickson’s roof design of transparent, spinning disks.

Grey Encounter is a striking work from this part of Smith’s oeuvre. Through his experimentation with this style, he learned much about colour - then, by the early 1970s, he evolved into a new painting approach, one which reflected his roots in the landscape.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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