Installation video
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Installation view
Artwork © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
![Alexandria Smith [Ruminations on] the joy fantastic, 2022. Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm) © Alexandria Smith](https://gagosian.com/media/images/exhibitions/2022/alexandria-smith-pretend-gravitas-and-dream-aborted-givens/_ywMByXTmdBT_300x300.jpg)
Alexandria Smith
[Ruminations on] the joy fantastic, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm)
© Alexandria Smith
Alexandria Smith
Libations for soul wares, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 47 ⅞ inches (152.2 × 121.6 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Alexandria Smith
how the light gets in, 2022
Mixed media on paper, in artist’s frame, 22 ⅞ × 23 ⅝ × 1 ¾ inches (58 × 60 × 4.5 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
![Alexandria Smith [we be] spring, 2021. Mixed media on paper, in artist’s frame, 24 ⅝ × 27 × 1 ¾ inches (62.5 × 68.5 × 4.5 cm) © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd](https://gagosian.com/media/images/exhibitions/2022/alexandria-smith-pretend-gravitas-and-dream-aborted-givens/8kQl5E2Rxd34_300x300.jpg)
Alexandria Smith
[we be] spring, 2021
Mixed media on paper, in artist’s frame, 24 ⅝ × 27 × 1 ¾ inches (62.5 × 68.5 × 4.5 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Alexandria Smith
Stars in my pocket, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Alexandria Smith
a Mythopoeic ecstasy, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Alexandria Smith
a coloured tomorrowland, 2021
Mixed media on paper, in artist’s frame, 22 ½ × 19 ½ x 1 ¾ inches (57 × 49.4 × 4.5 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Alexandria Smith
In the sha(llows)dows, 2021
Mixed media on paper, in artist’s frame, 22 ½ × 19 ½ × 1 ¾ inches (57 × 49.4 × 4.5 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Alexandria Smith
The Lightbearers, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 49 ½ × 85 inches (125.7 × 215.9 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
Alexandria Smith
Reverence to my Glories, 2022
Mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)
© Alexandria Smith. Photo: Rob McKeever
My characters embody multiple states of being as manifestations of hybridity and duality that simultaneously challenge heteronormative gender roles, allude to a divided self, and underscore the complex realities of humanity.
—Alexandria Smith
Gagosian is pleased to present Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens, an exhibition of new works by Alexandria Smith at its Park & 75 location. Organized by Antwaun Sargent, this is Smith’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens, Smith continues her investigation of selfhood alongside the confidences, contradictions, and uncertainties of the queer Black femme body through allegorical assemblage paintings and collage drawings housed in the artist’s custom frames.
Smith’s mixed-media works begin with drawings, which she develops intuitively within an ever-evolving personal cosmology. Atop colorful arrangements of bold shapes, she layers sculpted elements of painted wood and polymer clay that emerge beyond the picture plane, inspired by the pioneering assemblage artist Betye Saar, Black womanist literature, science fiction, and album art of the 1960s and ’70s.
Alexandria Smith has curated a selection of films that have influenced her practice for many years, as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. The program, on view in the theater and online from May 20 to June 2, 2022, features cinema exploring themes of loneliness through the prism of the fantastical, notions of family through spirituality, and the deconstruction of narrative through the disruption and manipulation of time.
The artist speaks with author Nalo Hopkinson about what it means to depict the body, the struggles to embark on new projects, and the contours of space and place in the creation of fiction and art.
This year marks the centennial of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.” In its honor, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, staged the exhibition IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism, which will be traveling to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, before closing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To mark the occasion and the exhibition, artists Glenn Brown and Alexandria Smith met to discuss the influence of the movement on their own practices.
Alexandria Smith and Akwaeke Emezi take up themes of queerness, hybridity, and embodied memory in their respective visual and literary works. Here, Emezi responds to Smith’s painting Languorous undulations (in the temple of my familiar) (2022) with an eponymous piece of flash fiction.
