Gemma Smith’s paintings and sculptures engage with modernism’s abstract legacy, but her relationship to this inheritance is based on a complicated symbiotic strategy. That is to say she exploits the stylistic, compositional and ideological orders of geometric abstraction mainly to privilege her own intuitive creativity. In so doing, she alerts us to the pleasures of art-making that are linked to improvisation and playful invention. This is in marked contrast to the predictable processes of construction that often characterise the styles from which she borrows.
Modernism’s abstract trajectory was in part aligned with a Formalist history of art that supported the production of colour field and hard-edged geometric abstract painting. For theorists like Clement Greenberg an ideological framework of purism, autonomy, sanctity and self-reflexivity defined such styles. This echoed a Neo-Kantian view that empirical experimentation in art led to the development of verifiable signs of aesthetic and cultural ‘progress’ through the application of abstract modes of signification. What was sometimes censored from this history was the work of the Surrealists and those who exploited the sheer joy of creative endeavour and the frission generated by improvisation, excess and self-indulgent play.
In its wake, some postmodern artists responded to Modernism’s challenging and idealistic achievements by resorting to defensive deconstructions and anxiety-relieving pastiche. In the contemporary moment however Hal Foster can claim that the canons of modern art are now ‘less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through’. Some of today’s post-avant-garde artists still use parody or retro-nostalgic tropes, but there are a wealth of other takes that include Neo-Conceptual artists’ willingness to exploit and reconstruct Modernism’s internal rhetorical contradictions; artists who use syncretic means that meld modernist elements with contemporary artistic... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Adaptable (dark peach/red oxide), 2008. Synthetic polymer paint on aircraft plywood, polyester, 65 x 50cm (dimensions variable). Photograph: Ashley Barber.
Untitled #4, 2009. Acrylic on board, 34 x 27.5cm. Courtesy the artist.
