Audio Guide Transcript Narrator: Richard Smith's career spans two generations of artists.
In the 1960s, as an influential painting tutor at the Royal College of Art, he was both teacher and critic to artists such as Derek Boshier,
David Hockney and Peter Phillips.
In the late 1950s, he had been one of a group of artists making very large-scale abstract works.
This work, Gift Wrap, marks an important turning point in Smith's career. Katharine Stout of Tate Britain, co-curator of this exhibition:
Katharine S: "In 1959 he went to New York on a Harkness Fellowship, and when he came back in 1961, his work began to
refer more explicitly to pop imagery, to commercial advertising and packaging.
And we can see this in Gift Wrap.
This work exploits the three-dimensional form of cigarette packets. It's a vast work, it's over 5 metres long, and in a way the scale
is similar to billboard advertising or widescreen movies, which Smith had encountered in the States.
Gift Wrap is a three-dimensional canvas; it's oil on canvas but it actually has the form of the cigarette packets which come out towards
the viewer. When you install the work it comes in sections.
So it's quite a sort of aggressive work in the sense that it demands quite a spatial response from the viewer."
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