Galleries One & Two
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Geoffrey Todd Smith’s solo show, Assembly in Galleries 1 and 2 at our Chicago location. This group of recent works on paper shows the artist turning his attention to invented portraiture alongside the abstract works that led to this departure. Please join us for an opening reception on February 28, 2025 from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through April 12 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.
Geoffrey Todd Smith’s, Assembly, as the title suggests, is a gathering of invented portraits, as well as a reference to the way every character is constructed. Each playful visage is developed from colorful, interlocking shapes into a bifurcated humanoid form and adorned with a skin of spikey hand-drawn marks. There are no bodies, garments, props, or environments to provide clues about each entity’s circumstance. Instead, Smith constructs the heads with a variety of cartoonish anthropomorphic features, occasional animal references, and geometric voids that imbue the images with a cold, robotic stare. Like a screen actor in a close-up, each persona relies only on nuanced expressions which change moods depending on where the viewer’s gaze settles within the multi-eyed portrait. In the end, a cheeky title is given to each work, providing a sense of the artist’s mindset, but offering no concrete narrative.
In Gallery 2, Geoffrey Todd Smith will display a selection of abstract predecessors to his recent portraits. While making these works, he was consumed with creating an ornamental floating object. Beginning with a large penciled-in oval contained within the rectangular page, the artist gradually accrued a symmetrical grid of frilly, decorative shapes working to the oval’s edge. As Smith began adorning the first of these ruffly gouache underpaintings with a field of zigzags and spikes, he noticed the hint of a stylized face staring back at him. As he continued to embolden this motif, each work became a sort of decorative mirror with multiple sets of embedded eyes, eventually leading him to make the logical leap to portraiture.
Geoffrey Todd Smith (b. 1973, Cleveland, OH) has work in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, The Progressive Insurance Art Collection, Hallmark Inc., Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Soho House Chicago, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana, and Harper College in Illinois. His work has been shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Hyde Park Art Center, The Union League, DePaul Art Museum and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago; Luis de Jesus Gallery and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles; The Hughes Gallery in Australia; The Green Gallery and Real Tinsel in Milwaukee; TOA Presents in Minneapolis; Left Field in Los Osos, CA; The Front in New Orleans; Illinois State Museum, and the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, New City, The Seen, New American Paintings, Bad at Sports, art ltd, Juxtapoz, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine. Smith lives and works in Chicagoland.
For his 16-year survey at (northern) Western Exhibitions, the gallery commissioned an essay by Dominic Molon, the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. From an excerpt of “A dot, a line, and a pattern walk into a bar …” Molon wrote:
A painting such as ‘Show Me All of Your Piercings and I’ll Tell You All of My Dreams’ possesses a stoic restraint in its use of white, black, gold, gray, and brown, and tightly alternating patterns. Contrast this with the fluidity and off-centeredness of ‘Unmemorable Tryst with a Hypnotist,’ which layers differently patterned circular, ovoid, sunburst, and square forms (among others) with curving lines of varying thickness in a seemingly inchoate jumble. Philip Glass meets David Lee Roth … Stephen Wright meets Sam Kinison … Michael Snow meets Mel Brooks and so on. Smith fascinatingly alternates the personality of his paintings within his own oeuvre, making the inconsistency of their temperament and tone an absolute constant in his practice.