Smith’s vigorous and dynamic paintings and sculptures toy with pictorial depth and geometric abstraction and employ a radical exuberance of colour. Entanglement Factor featured a selection of work from across Smith’s corpus including work from her new series of paintings.

In these new smaller works Gemma built on ideas explored in her earlier chess-board works, presenting a pulsing, push-pull of gesturally applied colour. With vigorous confident mark making and vast, open backgrounds, these works presented an energy and vitality that could be read as a distillation of some of her colour field experiments in earlier geometric, abstract paintings. Exhibited alongside these paintings are her new sculptural ‘boulders’. Constructed from multi-coloured translucent acrylic, these crystalline monument-like sculptures reinterpreted her sculptural ‘adaptables’ – the plywood sculptures that can be reconfigured endlessly - forming and reforming new sculptural positions.

These gem-like ‘boulder’ works were solid and precious seeming, with their translucent coloured planes overlapping and mutating as the viewer circles the sculpture. Presented together these works revealed a heightened trust in the dynamics of colour. In these new works Smith loosened her grid, and freed a space for her colours to play out their own combinations and interactions, variously repelling and vibrating, creating new and unexpected correlations.