Gemma Smith 'Eleven' 1024 Piece Puzzle

The Artist Series are square jigsaw puzzles of 1024 pieces created in collaboration with three acclaimed female artists Ulla Von Brandenburg, Hilarie Mais and Gemma Smith. As reproductions these objects of play invite an engagement with the conceptual proposals of each of the artists' practices, providing an entry point to a deeper understanding of the ideas explored in contemporary art.

Gemma Smith Eleven
Colour is both subject and content in Gemma Smith’s luminous paintings, which revel in the interaction of intense pigments. Nuanced arrangements of calibrated primaries pull and push the picture plane. Smith’s palette has reached to the extremes of the chromatic scale in works such as Eleven, which are loaded with titanium white, exacting their colour play at the palest end of the spectrum. She talks of making a painting where the colours are still active but almost indiscernible, emulating the phenomena of retinal burn after looking at one of her more high-key compositions.

Reproduced as a jigsaw puzzle the act of recomposing the image challenges and confirms our ability to recognise colour even at the very threshold of perception.

Gemma Smith is a visual artist based in Sydney, Australia. Smith’s work is held in many private, state and national collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Her work is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery Sydney; Milani Gallery, Brisbane; and Starkwhite Gallery New Zealand.

Assembled dimensions: 635mm x 635mm