About the artist:

Born 1955 in Ponce, Puerto Rico Lives and works in Farmington, Connecticut Cary Smith’s paintings offer vibrant adaptations of traditions in Modernist design and abstraction. Painting at human scale on mid-sized square canvases, the artist generates precise, opaque geometric shapes and multi-colored lines to create optically charged compositions. The paintings’ colorful exuberance and rhythmic spatial relationships enliven the cool formalism associated with hard-edge abstraction. Smith says, “I try to make visually clear, visceral, cerebral, psychological abstractions. I’m interested in contradictions that seem strangely harmonic.” Smith earned a BFA from Syracuse University Art School, Syracuse, New York, in 1976. His work has been widely collected by national and international museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Smith was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1993, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1991-1992.