Art Work: Meet the Painter

How do you know you want to be an artist? What is the best way to talk about yourself and your work?

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is pleased to announce the fifth edition of our Art Work series ‘Art Work: Meet the Painter.’ This special Art Work event especially for 6th form students invites you to meet Anj Smith. Smith is a London based artist who produces small and highly detailed paintings. The content of her work is mysterious; it is loaded with imagery and spans portrait, landscape and still-life formats simultaneously.

For this Art Work event you will be able to find out about Smith’s career as an artist, how she arrived at being a painter and what issues and challenges she has faced on her journey to success. You will also have the opportunity to select a single piece of your own art work to share with Smith for an individual tutorial with the artist.

11.00 Arrival & welcome 11.30 Introductory talk by Anj Smith 12.30 Time to view exhibitions if you wish to stay 13.30 Individual Surgery Sessions with the artist

Anj Smith will be available for individual tutorials with 10 lucky students. You should bring a single piece of your work to discuss. Please request a tutorial when booking.

Students may attend with art teachers / tutors / parents / alone.

This event is free, but booking is necessary. School bookings are limited to 10 places per school. Only individuals can book tutorial slots, with sessions lasting 10 minutes. Please email education@hauserwirth.com to book.

About Anj Smith

‘I love the idea that painting is dead and yet is still limping on to hypnotise and seduce us. For me, this is where the uniquely profound nature of painting is located. No other medium offers this specific legacy, which feels particularly apt in negotiating the great global & personal uncertainties of now. This difficult, baggage-ridden, faltering yet essentially surviving medium enables me to excavate often-overlooked art histories. These then filter down, combining with my lived experiences to form the layers of the work. Painting can facilitate the complexity of all of this, allowing me to explore the very edges of representation.’

Anj Smith is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. Born in 1978 in Kent, England, Anj Smith studied at Slade School of Fine Art and at Goldsmiths College in London. Smith’s work has been exhibited at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, England; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville TN; Hudson Valley Centre for Contemporary Art, Peekskill NY; La Maison Rouge, Paris, France, and Me Collector’s Room, Berlin, Germany, among other museums and galleries in Europe, the United States and Asia.

In 2016, Anj Smith guest curated the Bow Open Show at the Nunnery Gallery, London. In 2018 the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland, will present a major solo exhibition with the artist. Smith’s work is also displayed in the collections of many leading international museums and collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA; DRAF David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK and the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland.

Photo: Alex Delfanne