Michael E. Smith begins each exhibition by collecting and loosely assembling his materials in the studio. He calls these ‘material sketches’. This process also involves a rigorous investigation of the associations each object or material has: its relationship to the world and to people, its culturally specific referents, its place in the economy. To get to know the meaning of an object as closely as possible is also to make it suddenly become strange, unfamiliar, alien. His diverse material choices - a drone; a stork’s beak; nail guns; a dinosaur’s egg, for instance - tend to be objects or part-objects at the end of their lifespan of usefulness. Functionally spent, they evoke a variety of fragile states – physical, emotional, economic and political. Yet, in their plane materiality, they remain obdurately existent, uncannily orbiting the outer stretches of everyday life. In the gallery, Smith responds to the conditions around his works; his objects finding their final arrangements in relation to how they behave semantically in the room and with one another. Often the space itself is altered in subtle ways such as the removal or dimming of lighting, the addition of sound, or interventions into the way the room is moved through. In this way, absence or emptiness itself shapes Smith’s work, the tension built into it resonating between order and harmony and disarray and depression. Oscillating between humour and pathos, Smith exposes the lifespan of the object from the point of first desire to post- mortem; highlighting their life cycle, and - crucially - their retrievable value.

Michael E. Smith was born in 1977 in Detroit, Michigan, and lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit (2006), and completed his MFA at Yale School of Art (2008). His work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2023); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2021); Secession, Vienna (2020); Kunsthalle Basel (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2017); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2017); and Kunstverein Hannover, Hanover (2015) Most recently he showed at Modern Art, London (2023) Smith has participated in international group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (2022 and 2012); the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); and the 13th Baltic Triennial (2018). He has shown in recent group exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2022); Fondation Carmignac, Hyères (2021); The Power Station, Dallas (2019); and Kunsthaus Zürich (2018). Smith’s sculptures are held in collections including the Columbus Museum of Art; Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen; MCA Chicago; Mudam, Luxembourg City; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.