Anthony Smart
biography
all works
In the early-Eighties, Smart and a number of other sculptors, teaching alongside the painter Alan Gouk, sought to reinvigorate abstract sculpture at St. Martin’s through a study of the structures of the body. He showed the first of this new work, in forged steel, in a small group show of sculptors from Stockwell Depot at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, 1982. This period of work culminated in the 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition ‘Have You Seen Sculpture From the Body?’ and the subsequent tour of work to venues around Britain, organised and curated by Smart, Katherine Gili and Robert Persey. Further developments of the forged steel sculptures were shown at the Conde Duque Centre in Madrid in 1988. He has shown infrequently since then, returning to a more certainly abstract path, one which maintains its physicality across complex spatial configurations. His first solo show of new sculpture was at Poussin in 2009.Anthony Smart
Anthony Smart was born in Hull in 1949. He studied sculpture at Hull Art College and St. Martin’s School of Art between 1967 and 1973, and went on to teach at St. Martin’s until 1986. Smart worked at Stockwell Depot and Greenwich Studios in the Seventies, associating with other abstract steel sculptors and abstract painters in exhibiting work at the annual Stockwell Depot shows from 1974-79. He moved his studio to Yorkshire in the late Seventies, and following a period in NE Scotland, now lives and works in Norfolk. Smart’s early sculpture was included in a number of important survey shows, including William Tucker’s ‘The Condition of Sculpture’ at the Hayward Gallery, 1975, and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee exhibition in Battersea Park, 1977.