Gordon Smith

Vancouver artist Gordon Smith (1919–2020) was born in Hove, Sussex, England and immigrated to Canada in 1934. He was a significant figure in a group of artists associated with the establishment of modernist painting in Vancouver in the 1950s, which included B.C. Binning, Jack Shadbolt and Don Jarvis. West Coast abstraction at that time was unique in that it attempted to reconcile landscape traditions with the non-referential tendencies prevalent at the time in New York. The working out of this formal equation continued throughout Smith’s career and his work alternated between the purely abstract and the figurative at various stages.