Bio:

Brooklyn-based artist Samantha Keely Smith was born in England. After moving to the US as a child, Smith went on to study Art and Art History at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and received a BFA with Honors from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (Painting, 1991).

Samantha’s paintings are included in private and public collections in the US, Europe and UK.

About the work:

The paintings represent the landscape of the psyche – the place where the conscious and unconscious meet. In the work Samantha addresses the delusions of order and control that human beings cling to as they navigate the fundamental unpredictability of reality and sense their own finiteness in the immensity of time and nature.

These reflections on human mortality and fragility have taken on greater urgency in the context of growing environmental devastation and the implications for the precariousness of human existence. The existential and the personal—the exterior and the interior—are intertwined in Samantha's paintings. Throughout all of her work there is an underlying propensity for hope in the face of our struggle with the darkness.