Anj Smith's inner landscapes on display at Florence's Bardini Museum

The Bardini Museum in Florence hosts the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum by British artist Anj Smith until May 1, 2022. A willow grows aslant the brook, this is the title of the exhibition, is curated by Sergio Risaliti and organized by MUS.E, and presents a selection of twelve worksin which the artist’s inner landscapes populated by faces, animals and surreal elements dialogue with the museum’s collection of ancient art.

In his mastery there is never nostalgia for the past or craft narcissism. The technique is not intended to faithfully reproduce reality. The meticulous magnificence of his representations carries with it elements of disquiet. The portraits and still lifes have something disturbing about them; the refinement and elegance with which the representations are constructed seem to share the sense of fragility and transience of nature. Her work is a highly topical response to the more classical vanitas, a reflection on the promiscuous but fascinating relationship between beauty and death, between fullness and emptiness, between pleasure and dissatisfaction. Anj Smith’s landscapes are inner fantasies from which hybrid, dreamlike creatures emerge. Art history is combined with fashion history, scientific illustration with Gothic imagery, the iconic with the rhetoric of medieval and Renaissance symbolism and allegory. The viewer is invited to be patient and to look with curiosity to enter these wonderful Wunderkammern, to take a journey that is not only optical but mental among iconographic repertoires and minor arts.

Anj Smith’s art takes a primarily counter-cultural approach in a current climate where visual information is constantly disseminated for superficial and hasty consumption. This urgency to slow down and reflect is thought of by the artist as a balm to soothe our troubled present. Second, “the pause required to fully appreciate these works allows for much more than this coveted respite from the background noise of our complex lives,” the artist declares. He intends to promote and cultivate critical thinking that transcends aesthetic pleasure.

For info: musei.civici@comune.fi.it

Hours: Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Tickets: Full 7 euros, reduced 5.50 euros.

Image: Anj Smith, Names of the Hare, detail (2017-18; oil on linen, 65.5 x 50 cm) ©2018 Alex Delfanne.

Anj Smith's inner landscapes on display at Florence's Bardini Museum

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