NEW YORK.- The Marlborough Gallery presents its first show of 2005 of new paintings by the young figurative painter, Clive Smith. Entitled different but the same the exhibition will take place at Marlborough’s 57th Street gallery. This will be Smith’s second show in New York, and it is bound to capture the attention of anyone interested in painting, and in particular, in a new concept of portraiture. The show will consist mainly of multi-panel portraits in oil, watercolor, and pen on paper. Smith’s paintings of individuals makes one slow down and look at the human figure. The portraits are based on the artist’s idea of “marking time through daily or weekly repetition” and of capturing the interrelationship between the sitters and the artist’s relative observation and relationship to them. These time-sequence portraits, executed in oil on block-like panels ranging in size from two by two inches to twenty-two by twenty-two inches, are installed in sculptural formations on the wall that represent how the work was created or a feeling of the time spent between the artist and the sitter. The number of panels varies for each work: for example, June 2004 with my father consists of thirty cubes, each three by three inches, installed in a vertical line in the corner of the room. Each day of June 2004 Smith painted on one side of the cube his father’s portrait in the morning and then on the other side his own portrait in the afternoon. In another, such as the artist’s extraordinary self-portraits painted over a year, the artist painted 365 small panels, one each day. The sheer discipline needed to finish this work is as breathtaking as are the depth and subtlety of the individual portraits.

Smith brings to his work the tradition of English figurative painting, but the combination of living in New York for the last fifteen years and his absorption of minimalism and process based theory have helped him to create a new kind of portraiture. The conceptual scope behind these multiple portraits is that shown together they become a portrait of time. The artist has stated in his notes: “by creating a repeated structure of time within a piece of work one opens up to the possibilities of chance, tempting that moment when the hand and eye disconnect from the consciousness of painting. When painting another person one is never creating an image solely of the sitter; the artist is always present within the work. From the guarded initial meeting on the first panel to the relaxed, open emotion of knowing someone over an extended period of time, the paintings make notes of the daily variations of people working together. At the end of the sitting whatever happens in that time period exists for us to see, and only when the works are sequentially installed do we understand the dynamics that transpired during the sitting.”

Along with the portraits will also be large oils on canvas, each of a male or female nude and each executed on a panel measuring ten feet high by three feet ten inches wide. These exquisitely painted nudes, seated on a steel support and set in space against a white background, are both startling and majestic. As with the portraits, they show Smith to be a painter of uncommon talent. Indeed, there are few, if any, young painters working today that have engaged so successfully in painting the nude body and in penetrating the psychological hurtles of the human face.

Smith was born in 1967 in St Albans, England. He received a BA in Fashion Design at Kingston Polytechnic in 1988 and studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League in New York from 1995-97. In 1998 he won the BP Portrait Award’s Third Prize at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and in 1999, First Prize. His first show in New York was at Marlborough Chelsea in 2000. The artist lives and works in New York City.