Leon Polk Smith: Big Form, Big Space

Leon Polk
Smith: Big Form, Big Space
accompanies the recent exhibition of the same name at the Contemporary Art
Gallery (CAG), Vancouver (2021) and its extended presentation at Palm Springs
Art Museum, California (2022), focusing on paintings and works on paper that
chart a key moment in Smith's career. Born outside Chickasha, in what would
become Oklahoma, Smith grew up in a farming community among the Chickasaw and
Choctaw nations. During the 1950s, his
work moved away from the Eurocentric
impulses of his formative years to introduce and connect to themes, ideas,
forms and conditions present in his rural upbringing and personal identity.

Including
critical essays by Barry Schwabsky and Ashley Holland, this extensively
illustrated publication features a series of wide-ranging readings of Smith's
work, examining the complexities surrounding issues of context, time and identity
within an appreciation of his place in hard-edge modernist abstraction.

Leon
Polk Smith (1906-1996) holds a unique place in the tradition of American geometric
abstract painting, heralded for his lifelong commitment to simple shapes,
brilliant colours and intense compositions. Since his first solo exhibition in
New York City in 1941, he has been the subject of numerous retrospectives,
with work included in major collections, such as the Art Institute of
Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Solomon R
Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern
Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American
Art.