Equinox Gallery is pleased to present Gordon Smith: Through the Trees - an exhibition of new paintings and collaged works on canvas. This exhibition takes Gordon Smith’s imaginative and complex perspective of the forest as both subject and object where the landscape can be pulled apart and reconstructed as an idea. For 24 consecutive years, the opening of Gordon Smith’s show in September has come to denote the beginning of the cultural season in Vancouver, and this exhibition reflects Smith’s continued commitment to his artistic practice.
Gordon Smith (1919-2020) was a key figure in contemporary Canadian art. Since the 1950s, he worked continuously to expand the dialogue between abstraction and representation. In his tangled paintings, there is the insinuation of entire fields of colour below the surface. Over the course of his 75-year long career he has made paintings employing that procedure of looping and overlapping, the movement of line to line, texture into texture and colour into colour. His work has been an evolving search for balance between abstraction and his love of the land, which has given us insight into both the act of painting and the essence of the West Coast.