Nicola Smith

Nicola Smith’s work interrogates the referential relationship between cinema and painting, reproducing individual film frames with a deliberate yet gentle infatuation. Previous bodies of work have considered the films of Buster Keaton, Jean-Louis Barrault, Claudia Weil and, since 2015, the removed, aesthetically spare work of Structuralist filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Smith’s delicate oil paintings, which have also depicted urban and natural landscapes, explore the processes of painting, the very act of looking, and the frisson between motion and stillness. The isolation and reiteration of distinct scenes in serial bodies of work, installed in roughly chronological order but still removed from their larger sequential context, results in a very particular form of attention. 

Smith has exhibited locally and internationally, and undertaken numerous residencies across Australia, Canada and America. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the prestigious NSW Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship and exhibited in the finalist exhibition at Artspace, Sydney. Notable group exhibitions include Painting. More Painting, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2016), and the Redlands Konica Art Prize, curated by Mikala Dwyer, National Art School, Sydney (2016). Smith's work is held in public collections including Artbank, Australia and private collections internationally.