Anj Smith: Paintings

Anj Smith's eerie and luminous paintings are exercises in extravagant meticulousness. The magic of her figures and motifs, however, derives in large part from the contrast Smith creates in surrounding areas of thickly applied impasto. This formal incongruence—between the intricate and the inchoate, between a jewel-like glow and rough scratchings, between filigree and mire—is crucial to Smith's work. Her work navigates a murky psychological space in which certainty is a vestige of the past, everything existing instead existing in a fragile, constantly shifting instability. This publication presents a selection of her intimate, intricately rendered canvases alongside illuminating texts by Alison Gingeras and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith.