Ali Smith

Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents an exhibition of ambitious new large-scale paintings by Ali Smith, making for her second major solo show with the gallery. Smith constructs elaborate micro and macrocosms through a delicate balance of chance and intention- simulating the complex balance found in organic structures. Often drawing from studies on paper and collages to create her large-scale compositions, Smith has continued to evolve her idiosyncratic, highly personal language of motifs and forms that are at once fluid and open.

Historically, Smith's elaborate undulations at once recall the whimsy of Gaudi architecture, the romance of Baroque ornamentation, and the intricacy of Art Nouveau. In this new body of work, she allows her canvases to evolve and unfold over time – the compositions vying for space within kaleidoscopic dimensionality and inversion of planes. With her emblematic vibrant palette, she manipulates jarring angles, soft curves and intricate nooks to unearth abstract terrains and surreal forms. Oftentimes, the fragmented forms collide and layer against a deep space, forming puzzle-like composites of the paint's diverse malleability. Smith's inquisitiveness about awkward and unexpected beauty becomes manifest in richly hued steeples, veins, scales and tendrils of lavish paint, which converge into alluringly obscure and impetuous anatomies. Her simultaneously calculated and uninhibited investigation of equilibrium is parallel to that of her medium, and forges an optic tension that is both unsettling and seductive in its enigmatic composition.

Ali Smith (born 1976, Newport Beach, CA) received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (CA), and has since had solo exhibitions in New York, Houston and Los Angeles. She has been included in numerous group shows, including those at the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Irvine Fine Arts Center (CA) in addition to shows in Boston, Tokyo and Basel. Her work is included in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), Progressive (OH) and the Chaney Family Collection (TX). Smith lives and works in Long Beach, CA.