Kate Smith Deep Privacy II

25 January –
22 February 2025

In Deep Privacy II, Kate Smith’s eighth solo exhibition with Sutton Gallery, the Wagga Wagga-based artist has produced two new painting suites informed by fifteen years of idiomatic visual practice. Ornate flourishes intermingle with brusque abstract gestures as Smith uses a range of pictorial framing and compositional devices to complicate the singularity of a given painting. Gestures, symbols, marks and erasures attenuate the supremacy of one another in Smith’s playful orbit; impulsive renderings of plinths, sunglasses, bananas and flowers underscore a whimsical vernacular that undermines the sincerity, gravitas and anodyne commercialism of Modernist painting.

Foregrounding Smith’s new work is a salon presentation of sixteen historical paintings, assemblages and collages, each relating to the defining currents and through-lines from throughout the artist’s career. Collectively, these artworks explore the modes of production and techniques which characterise aspects of Smith’s painting, such as paint application, subject matter, and colour palette. Deep Privacy II bridges the earlier Deep Privacy/Convex (2012, Sutton Gallery) to denote Smith’s thoroughness and intention, all the while embracing the inexorable web of her distinctly iconoclastic approach.

Artist Biography

Kate Smith’s paintings lay bare the conventions of the medium and attend to its limitations. Wry, witty yet critically perceptive, her works are active sites of negotiation in which opposing elements defiantly co-exist. Confident brushstrokes collide with hesitant gestures to fluidly recall references from popular culture, art history, and personal anecdotes, each with latent resonance in both artwork and title. Liberally punctuating her work with an idiosyncratic array of motifs stretching from the banal to the peculiar, the artist liberates subjects from their conventional meaning and embraces the freedom of plenitude to undermine the strictures of the painting tradition.

As explicitly tangible objects, Smith’s work frequently calls attention to an artwork’s objecthood with implications on the picture plane and spatial composition. Whether through the irregular wedging of a canvas, the braiding of a frame, floor-level installation or the incorporation of obscure relief elements, this subversive approach negotiates the painting’s predetermined set of objectives to explore plurality and flux. For Smith, the process of painting is one of constant re-evaluation.

Kate Smith (b. 1980, Cootamundra, NSW) lives and works in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Since her graduation from the Australian National University School of Art, Canberra in 2005, Smith’s work has been exhibited frequently across galleries, institutions and artist-run spaces throughout Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Smith has participated in several important surveys of contemporary art in Australia within institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury. She has been the recipient of awarded residencies within institutions including Artspace, Sydney; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne and Canberra Contemporary. Examples of her work are included in significant public and private collections across Australia.

Artist’s profile

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