“I see lots of parallels between fashion
and religious sects.”
Anj Smith
Anj Smith
In a manner reminiscent
of the gothic fantasy genre most associated with the work of the American film
director Tim Burton, London based painter Anj Smith explores in her
highly detailed small paintings the dark side of life in general and fashion in
particular.
As she told
the Independent
on Sunday about her 2004 work Opus Dei Lite (see above) “Opus Dei Lite came
about when I saw that the Weight Watchers breakfast was identical to the Opus
Dei cult breakfast – dry rusks. I really like dark stuff like that.”
Nine years
later, Smith, talking to the Huffington
Post about her New York exhibition The
Flowering of Phantoms explained the continuing motivation for her work
stating “Very loosely speaking, the flowering
'phantoms' of the show's title relate to the way that language operates in a
relentless process of evolution, with new meanings constantly springing from
the death throes of their predecessors. The art historical context of painting
now is dragged into this as much as any other language (a skull in a Dutch
Golden age still-life now seems to signify McQueen rather than mortality. Not
even that, thanks to the market rip-offs, perhaps the old sign for death has
now just emptied out to solely indicate genericism). To me this process appears
as a perfect reflection a current metaphysical state, where the ground
underfoot feels marshy, with no stable structures are around to help us define
our identity, or to quantify things.”
About her choice of medium, the Goldsmiths’ trained artist said “In
terms of making an image, the process of painting is an odd choice in the
context of our sleek technology -- it's clumsy, awkward and it compromises the
image, and takes months! But for me, that's where its profundity lies. There is
something gratuitous about it, pointless even, and yet painting's seductive
power remains unabated -- which explains its survival. For these reasons, I
think it brilliantly reflects a contemporary headspace now, and how it feels to
negotiate basic aspects of existence now.”
With influences that range from Persian miniature
painting via the Dutch Golden Age to high fashion
Smith’s work integrates a high art aesthetic into the fashion of the high
street.
As she told Forbes
Magazine’s Grace Banks “When I look at the zeitgeist now I see that people are
looking for authenticity. Fashion is not a frivolous or trivial thing, but
actually, we are wearing the values of our time and they say a lot about how we
construct our identity and a lot about our time. There’s a lot of really
vacuous comment about fashion that doesn’t interest me but I will always be
interested in the concept of change and transformation that it offers.”
Smith’s current exhibition Phosphor on the Palms is currently on show at
London’s Hauser
& Wirth gallery until the 21st of November.
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