John Smith: The Kiss

La Galerie centre for contemporary art launches the season with France’s first major exhibition by British filmmaker John Smith.

Following on the seven-film series Hotel Diaries (2001 – 2007), shown in September 2013, The Kiss brings together ten recent and earlier works—one of them being shown for the first time—in which documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction are separated only by the most tenuous of boundaries. Often drawing on the artist’s everyday existence, with jump-cuts from his bedroom to his neighbourhood, Smith‘s video work effects text-inflected shifts between the documentary aspect of his images and the terrain of fiction.

John Smith (born in 1952, lives in London) teaches Fine Arts at the University of East London. In 2011 he was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize and went on to win the Jarman Award in 2013. Since 1972 he has made over 50 films, videos and installations which have been shown worldwide in cinemas and art galleries and on television. He has also taken out prizes at many major international festivals.

The many acquirers of his work include Arts Council England, the Tate Gallery, the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Foundation, the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Ferens Art Gallery and the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. He has recently had solo exhibitions venues including Lulu in Mexico City (2014), the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh (2014), the Sidney Cooper Gallery–Canterbury Christ Church University (2014), the Figge von Rosen Gallery, Cologne (2013), the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea in Lisbon (2013), the Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), Ferens Art Gallery in Hull (2012), the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover (2012), Uppsala Art Museum in Sweden (2011) and the Royal College of Art Galleries, London (2010).