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Richard Smith is a British painter and printmaker who studied at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1954 to 1957.  In 1959, he went to New York on a Harkness Fellowship, staying until 1961, painting and teaching. The paintings he made in that first period in the USA have been described in an article by Adrian Lewis, as combining 'the formal qualities of the work of American abstract painters, with references to American commercial culture, with its lush seductive colours, exploitation of magnification and soft-focus effects and, generally, its stimulation of desire and fantasy.' Smith's screenprint, P A Zoom, made for the iconic ICA Portfolio organized in 1964 by Richard Hamilton, is an early manifestation of British Pop Art, reproducing an image of a packet of cigarettes seen from the open end, with the untipped cigarettes increasingly magnified as their image is repeated.

Smith has lived in New York since 1978, and has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. His work is represented in numerous museum collections world-wide, including Tate, London; The British Museum, London; The Arts Council of Great Britain; The Government Art Collection, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.


Prints   

PM Zoom 1963
19 x 30 inches
Screenprint on paper

From the ICA Portfolio, edition of 40.

Butterfly from the Butterfly Suite 1972
25 x 36.5 inches
Etching and aquatint on paper

Edition number 40/40.