Gordon Smith

Gordon Smith (1919-2020) was a key figure in contemporary Canadian art. Born in England, Smith came to Canada in 1933 and studied at the Vancouver School of Art, the Winnipeg School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Since the 1950s, he worked to expand the dialogue between abstraction and representation that was rooted in landscape. Over the course of his 75-year long career he made paintings employing a procedure of looping and overlapping, the movement of line to line, texture into texture and colour into colour. His work evolved in a search for balance between abstraction and his love of the land, which provided insight into both the act of painting and the essence of the West Coast. Smith’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Musee des beaux-arts du Montreal, Smithsonian Institution, Washington and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1966, received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2007 and presented with the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts in 2009.