Richard Smith, CBE (27 October 1931 – 15 April 2016) was an English artist. Smith produced work in a range of styles, and is credited with extending the field of painting through his shaped, sculptural canvases. Born in Letchworth, England, Richard Smith completed service with the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong and went on to study at St. Albans School of Art (1952-54) and then continued as a postgraduate in the painting school at the Royal College of Art, London (1954-57), where he befriended fellow painters Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Robyn Denny.   

Following his move to New York on the Harkness Fellowship in 1959, Smith’s interest in advertising and popular culture grew and he began to lift his subject matter from the mass media, magazines and billboard adverts. His paintings from this period fuse pop imagery with gestural brushwork and saturated fields of color inspired by the Abstract Expressionist painters that he first saw in the major survey exhibition The New American Painting at Tate Gallery in 1959. In 1961 Smith had his first solo exhibition in New York City at Richard Bellamy’s influential Green Gallery, already noted for showing cutting-edge American Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg. In 1963, a solo show at the newly opened Kasmin Gallery in London consolidated Smith’s reputation as one of the most ambitious painters of his generation. In the mid-1960s Smith experimented with shaped canvases and constructions and as the decade continued his work became more minimal while retaining subjects based in the imagery of everyday life. His inventions of the mid-1970s, paintings on un-stretched canvases suspended on aluminum bars known as ‘kites’, brought him major commissions for corporate clients and for restaurants run by Mr. Chow, Terence Conran and others. A survey of his paintings from 1958 to 1966, was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in May 1966, and in 1970 he was the first artist to be given a solo show at the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In 1975 the Tate Gallery presented a retrospective of Smith’s paintings.