A contemporary of David Hockney and Peter Blake, Richard Smith CBE is a painter and printmaker often associated with colour field paining. Smith's lifelong subject was to be surface appearance: the resounding shallows of consumer culture; the complex sheen of advertising and packaging.
He was born in 1931 in Hertfordshire and attended the St Albans School of Art followed by post-graduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London from 1954-57. After lecturing at Hammersmith College of Art, in 1959 he was awarded the prestigious Harkness Fellowship to live and teach in New York for two years, where he produced paintings combining the formal qualities of American abstract painters which made references to the American commercial culture. In 1970 Smith was the British representative at the Venice Biennale and had a career retrospective at the Tate in 1975, when he was still in his 40s. He resettled permanently in New York in 1976. Smith’s greatest triumph as a painter was to blend various artistic movements and make them his own. His works are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London and the MoMA in New York.