1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, CA 90038, Los Angeles, United States
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Leon Polk Smith
Lisson Los Angeles and Marc Selwyn Fine Art present concurrent exhibitions of works by Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996), marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in more than a decade. Spanning both galleries, the presentations bring together more than twenty paintings alongside a selection of related works on paper, tracing the development and breadth of Smith’s mature practice from the mid-1950s through 1980. Featuring several works never before exhibited, the exhibitions explore Smith’s pioneering investigations of positive and negative space, line, color, and form, revealing the remarkable range of an artist whose approach to geometric abstraction remained both rigorous and inventive.
While sharing a common focus on Smith’s sustained exploration of geometry and space, the two presentations offer distinct perspectives on his practice. At Lisson Los Angeles, works including Inca (1970), Red Triangle, Black Square (1968), and Stretch of Black II (1961) foreground the relationships between individual shapes and the larger compositions they comprise. At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Romance of the Spheres (1963) and Rising Red (1980) highlight Smith’s investigations of curved forms, spatial tension, and the interplay between painted shape and surrounding ground. Together, the exhibitions illuminate the breadth of an artistic language in which seemingly simple geometric elements give rise to complex and shifting perceptions of space.
Smith was a foundational figure in American abstraction and one of the first artists of his generation to develop a personal geometry addressing space, repetition, modularity, and infinity. From the mid-1950s, he increasingly employed irregularly shaped canvases alongside oblong and circular formats. His Correspondence paintings, typically composed of vibrantly colored shapes divided by a precise, often irregular contour, anticipated aspects of the Hard-Edge and Minimalist styles that emerged over the following decade. Yet while many of his contemporaries moved away from Modernism’s relational principles, Smith continued to develop its formal and rational possibilities, using color and contour to unsettle traditional distinctions between figure and ground.
Smith’s path to abstraction was unconventional. Born in 1906 into a farming family in Chickasha, Indian Territory, in what became the state of Oklahoma a year later, he worked as a rancher and held various manual jobs before turning to art in his late twenties while studying at Oklahoma State College. He moved to New York in 1936 to pursue graduate study, where he drew formative inspiration from the Modernist works of Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian. As he later recalled, “I set out from Mondrian to find a way of freeing this concept of space so that it could be expressed with the use of the curved line as well as the straight.” This ambition is evident in Correspondence Red-Blue (1964), in which the meeting of distinct fields of color establishes a precise yet dynamic relationship between the two.
Smith’s interest in the spatial possibilities of the circle also informed Romance of the Spheres (1963), reflecting his conviction that a flat painted surface could suggest movement and curvature in multiple directions. This line of inquiry began in the late 1940s, when he became interested in the forms of balls depicted in an athletic catalogue. Their apparent combination of flatness and volume prompted him to investigate how simple geometric forms might generate an expanded sense of space, even within the confines of a rectangular canvas. The resulting works reveal an artist less concerned with depicting an illusionistic world than with activating the surface itself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Smith extended these investigations through increasingly complex, multipart compositions. His Constellation paintings, composed of multiple shaped canvases arranged in carefully calibrated configurations, approach a sculptural presence. Circles, arcs, bands, and blocks of color interact across separate panels, creating visual rhythms that shift according to the relationship between each component and the whole. The resulting compositions resist a single, fixed reading: their forms appear to advance or recede, expand or contract, as the eye moves across and between the individual canvases.
In works such as Inca (1970), this approach reaches a striking level of complexity. Comprising 48 round-cornered squares arranged in a panoramic grid, the work brings together configurations of straight and curved lines, bands, and semicircles. Shades of red, purple, and blue cohere and disperse across the composition, producing patterns that appear at once systematic and unpredictable. The title also reflects Smith’s enduring engagement with Indigenous American traditions. Of Cherokee descent, Smith drew upon his early experiences in the American Southwest, where color and form informed his understanding of the natural and cultural worlds around him. As he once reflected on his early surroundings, “I grew up in the Southwest where the colors in nature were pure and rampant,” and where his “Indian neighbors and relatives used color to vibrate and shock.”
By 1980, Smith’s commitment to abstraction remained undiminished. In Rising Red (1980), the expansive canvas continues his investigation of the expressive and spatial possibilities of color and form, demonstrating the vitality of a visual language he had spent decades refining. Across both exhibitions, Smith emerges as an artist who continually tested the limits of geometric abstraction, finding in the relationship between shape, color, and space an inexhaustible source of invention.
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