Jo Smail; South African 1943-; Abstract Forms, Diptych
Provenance : [Propriété non datée]
- The Engen Collection
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Notes : "The early paintings were made by pouring the paint onto stitched canvases and to a certain extent allowing the seams to dictate its flow. I enjoyed the sensations and atmospheres that colour evokes in contrast to the physical edges and geometrical divisions. The gestural paintings heralded an ongoing performance after the quiet. I continue to be excited by the tensions created between disparate elements and I record, examine and celebrate my preoccupations. I try to reconcile hesitations, repetitions, associations, references, ambiguities and contradictions is probably analogues to acknowledging, often with great insistence and feeling, various possibilities of meaning."-Jo Smail, January 19861 Jo Smail is a contemporary artist born in Durban, South Africa and educated in her home country before relocating to the United States. From 1988 to 2017, she taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she is now Professor Emeritus of Fine Art. Smail is internationally recognised for her paintings, drawings, collages and prints, which are characterised by layers of material accumulation, erasure and transformation. Her work is deeply informed by personal history, particularly her recovery from a stroke in 2000 and the loss of her studio in a fire in 1995. She has exhibited widely across the globe and her work has been featured in major publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and The Washington Post. Her works are held in prominent collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African National Gallery. Important collaborations include one with William Kentridge on the exhibition New Beginnings at Axis Gallery in New York (2006). She is also a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awarded in 1996. Smail is represented by Goya Contemporary in the United States. 1. Correspondence with Goya Contemporary, 2025. Thanks to Goya Contemporary for assisting in the cataloguing of this lot.
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