The American artist-photographer Seton Smith has lived between Paris and New York for several decades, and exhibitions in great American and European institutions have con­sistently honored her work. The Anne-Sarah Bénichou Gallery wishes to signal her return to the city, which has nourished that work and where she became known with an exhibition of emblematic works shown in museums.

Seton Smith’s singular gaze, her distinctive way of seeing the world not subjectively, but through an objective lens, have assured her an unusual place on the contemporary art scene. To this she has added a quite legible signature of images that invite us along to her explo­ra­tions of an intimate universe, at once close and distant, one of exteriors and interiors where any human presence is phantom, and where architectural elements, doorways and windows, rooms, corridors, and staircases are so many scrambled Hitchcockian shots where our gaze untiringly seeks light to a vanishing point on a vague and unfathomable horizon. Smith never brings too sharp a focus; rather, she practices distance without ever evading the eminently subjective nature of her subtle approach and sensitive, poetic, and analytic point of view. For 35 years now the artist has explored the recesses of architectural photography with a style whose constancy and visual discernment take nothing away from a formal enquiry evolving from year to year. The works presented in the gallery have been for the most part previously exhibited in museums, in particular an extensive retrospective of the Smith family at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, the Abattoirs Toulouse in France, and Kunstmuseum in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

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About the artist

Born in 1955 in New Jersey, Seton Smith is an established artist; she comes from a world-renowned family of artists. Daughter of the sculptor Tony Smith and sister of Kiki Smith, she decided to focus her own work on photography. She uses everyday-life objects that she represents with distinctive colors, from the Cibachrome printing. Her work is most of the time difficult to decipher and is open to a wide range of interpretations, because it is inspired by the individual memory of every spectator.

Her works are exhibited in the biggest collections in the world, such as Centre Pompidou, Modern Art Museum of Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum, Israelian Museum in Jerusalem.

She lives and works between Paris and New York.