Gallery 9 picks up Helen Smith

Gallery 9 has announced its representation of multi-disciplinary Sydney-based abstractionist Helen Smith.

First coming to artistic prominence in the early 2000s, Smith’s practice is influenced by a formal, minimalist viewpoint that favours simplicity of form and geometric abstraction.

Oil on canvas paintings, large-scale wall works and a number of ongoing photographic series derived from an interest in social and cultural systems form the basis for her enquiry. Trained at Curtin University of Technology, her clever manipulation of colour and space result in beautiful and intriguing works that are particularly compelling when viewed in person.

Smith has collaborated on a number of site specific, large-scale wall works with Western Australian painter Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, including an installation in the Art Gallery of Western Australia; in Hegenheim, France; and at the Institut Fur Alles Mogliche in Berlin.

In 2018, she participated in an artist’s residency with artisan print maker Sally Gimson in the United Kingdom and exhibited with Institut Fur Alles Mogliche in Berlin. She has also participated in research residencies at Point B Residency in New York, and in 2013 at the Institut Fur Alles Mogliche in Berlin.

Smith’s works are included in the collections of National Gallery of Australia, the Daimler Collection in Berlin, Artbank, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Australian Embassy in Madrid, Curtin University Collection, The University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, Bankwest, Hebel_121 Collection and various private collections in Australia and Europe.

This article was originally published 26 August 2021.

Image: Helen Smith, Blue Highway #47, 2021. Oil on linen, 133 × 213cm.