The artist
Gimpel Fils, London

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Richard Smith was a contemporary of Peter Blake, Robyn Denny and Joe Tilson at the Royal College of Art where he studied between 1954 and 1957. In 1959 Smith made his first extended trip to the United States when he won the Harkness Fellowship to travel in the USA for two years. Although Smith returned to Britain in 1961 to take up a post teaching painting at St Martins School of Art, works from the 1960s such as Billboard (1961) reflect the powerful influence of the imagery and scale of the American mass media, and the formal concerns of Abstract Expressionism on the British artist. The dominating advertising🐎 and packaging industries later inspired Smith to begin shaping his ꦐcanvasses. As the 1960s advanced into the 1970s, Smith progressively focussed his attention on the formal qualities of his paintings, experimenting with form and colour.

The present work belongs to Smith's series of 'kite' paintings, which incorporate materials such as string, tent poles and canvas to experiment with the concept of the painting as a stretched canvas hanging on the wall. &nbไsp;