Alexandria Smith

Alexandria Smith’s art addresses issues of identity as informed by autobiography, fiction, myth, collective memory, and history. She depicts metaphysical beings in primordial settings who embody states of growth and transformation. Her interest in hybridity and experimentation encompasses drawings with collage elements, paintings with sculptural assemblage, and immersive installations. Smith builds up dimensional components in her painted works, recently further articulating their surfaces through the incorporation of 3D-printed parts.

Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.

Artist Spotlight: Alexandria Smith features a new painting by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.

Photo: Ollie Adegboye

From the Quarterly

On Surrealism: Glenn Brown & Alexandria Smith

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.

Languorous undulations (in the temple of my familiar)

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.

Alexandria Smith Selects

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.