Anj Smith:The Sequin-Strewn Night at Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood
- LA Art Documents
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
Anj Smith
The Sequin-Strewn Night
Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, CA October 29, 2025 - January 24, 2026
For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in two decades, British artist Anj Smith presents a new body of painting where precarious psychological states and erotic desire intertwine to disrupt conventional depictions of motherhood and the female nude. Smith’s nuanced portrayals of a female-presenting body challenge the notion of a singular interpretation. Set in the context of toxic, inhospitable ecologies, the work explores the human potential for ingenuity, growth and the ability to thrive against the odds.
Drawing on references from film and literature, Smith’s luminous paintings combine intricate textures, saturated color banks and hallucinatory detail. Within these canvases’ imagined terrains, enigmatic figures and rarefied flora and fauna beckon viewers toward the possibility of transcendence, where resilience persists despite environmental collapse. Dissolving the boundaries between portraiture, landscape and still life, Smith’s paintings demand slow looking, revealing their details gradually and rewarding sustained attention.
The exhibition title is taken from a passage in Meret Oppenheim’s poem, ‘In the beginning is the end’ in which the late artist and writer conjured an idiosyncratic tableau of natural and manmade phenomena. For Smith, the poem’s ‘sequin-strewn nightscape’ recalls both star-filled skies and nocturnal revelry—life-affirming splendor that endures even within the most hostile of landscapes. Oppenheim’s refusal of convention—gendered, artistic and historical—finds kinship with Smith’s new canvases, which move from vast desert icescapes split by neon horizons to ambiguous figures cocooned in diaphanous tulle.