Margaret-Anne Smith is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo and group exhibits over the last twelve years include SMC Barrett Gallery, Neutra Museum Gallery, Wilshire Ebell, Coburn School of Music, Studio Eleven Gallery, Art Share Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, HBO Gallery, Bonham’s and Butterfields, and Pharmaka, all in the Los Angeles area. Her work was featured in the film Molly’s Game, directed by Aaron Sorkin, and is in numerous private collections.
Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Smith attended art school and received a diploma in film production in South Africa before emigrating to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film editing. Since 2000, she has turned her visual creativity full-time to art and has studied with Corey D’Augustine and Tom Wudl. Other artists who have influenced Smith’s work include Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Sarah Oppenheimer, László Moholy-Nagy, the architect and structural engineer Otto Frei, and Rene Magritte.
After a series of square oil paintings inspired by a sequence of poems written by the South African Resistance writer, Antjie Krog, Smith’s work has grown in size and in dimensions, incorporating painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage to intersect and inform each other, discovering new materials to better suit her needs, documenting her process, which becomes itself part of the body of work. An intrepid explorer of new mediums, her fastidious technique and craft always a beauty in itself, Smith’s latest work migrates from tabletop sculptures to large constructions to cut-and-painted stones in dialogue with each other. Too heavy to lift or too large to hold, but counter-intuitively light as air, at once abstract and intimate, these works invite curiosity, engagement, wonder.
Andrea Carter Brown
Los Angeles, February 2020
Group Exhibitions 2022 Cultivation: Studio Eleven at Colburn, Colburn School, Los Angeles, CA
2020 Hobson's Choice, Torrance Art Museum Online, Torrance, CA
2020 Antidote to Noise, Castelli Art Space, Culver City, CA
2018 Studio Eleven at Work, SMC Barrett Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2017 Studio Eleven at the Neutra, Neutra Museum Gallery, Los Angeles CA
2016 StudioEleven at the Ebell, Wilshire Ebell, Los Angeles, CA 2015 StudioEleven Coda at Colburn, Colburn School, Los Angeles CA
2013 Art Share, Los Angeles, CA
2009 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles, CA
2007 Bonhams & Butterfields, Los Angeles, CA
2006 Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA
Solo and Paired Exhibitions 2014 StudioEleven Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2008 HBO Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
Bibliography 2020 - Peter Frank: Discourse on Margaret-Anne Smith for the exhibition Antidote to Noise 2023 VoyageLA, Interview, Los Angeles, CA https://voyagela.com/interview/daily-inspiration-meet-margaret-anne-smith/
Curatorial Projects 2023 Geometrics, Expressions, Impressions: Studio Eleven Artists at Colburn, Colburn School, Los Angeles, CA. Co-curator. 2022 Cultivation: Studio Eleven at Colburn, Colburn School, Los Angeles, CA. Co-curator.
Community Engagement 2020 – 2023 FOCA Curatorial Committee for the Curators Lab, Los Angeles, CA 2014 – Present Founding member of StudioEleven, an artist’s co-op Los Angeles, CA