Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016

Leslie Smith III Assistant Professor UW–Madison Department of Art, since 2011 Painting and Drawing 2009 Master of Fine Arts, Yale University School of Art 2007 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art Recent achievements 2015 Vivir en la tierra plana (Living In The Flat Land), solo show, Galería Ponce+Robles, Madrid, Spain 2014 Vacation, solo show, Olive DeLuce Art Gallery, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MO 2014 VOLTA 10 Art Fair, group show, Basel, Switzerland 2014 PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, group show, New York 2014 Parallax Futured: Transtemporal Subjectivities, group show, Skirball Museum, Cincinnati 2014 Monochromatic, group show, Triumph & Disaster Gallery, Montgomery, AL 2014 Black In The Abstract, Part 2: Hard Edges/Soft Curves, group show, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 2014 As I Remembered, solo show, Beta Pictoris Gallery/Maus Contemporary Art, Birmingham, AL 2014 Opposing Dysfunction, solo show, Wriston Art Center Galleries, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI 2013 I Dream Too Much: Paintings by Leslie Smith III, solo show, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI 2013 Wisconsin 30, group show, Milwaukee Museum of Art Artist’s statement Leslie Smith III grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, in metropolitan Washington, DC. Smith is an oil painter known for his abstractions painted on shaped canvases. He engages in an expressionist-based practice, activating his canvases with color, gestural brushstrokes, conflicting geometries, and narratives that insinuate dissonance. Inspired by personal narrative and day-to-day interpersonal relationships, his paintings concentrate on employing abstraction to communicate the poetics of a human experience. His abstractions oscillate from amorphous to representational and bear meanings that hover between the suggestive and the indecipherable. Smith’s recent works focus on conceiving an architectural landscape of psychological and physical stasis, where all aesthetic forces and working mechanisms are equal, canceling out each other in opposition. He aspires to create a better representation of the cyclical, unsolvable, realities found in our common human experience. Recently, Smith has shifted into thinking about painting as an object on the wall that carries meaning in its physical pre

Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016 | Page 70