Rodney Smith, Photography between Real and Surreal
KUNSTHALLE VOGELMANN

Anne Loucks Gallery Winnetka is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition, Rodney Smith: Enchanted World.. The show will open Saturday, February 29th and run through April 19, 2025. Included in the exhibition will be twenty-five exceptional examples of the artist’s work from 1992-2015. The show also celebrates the recent release of the Getty Museum’s  retrospective monograph, Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith. The book’s author, Getty photography curator Paul Martineau, will be present at the opening reception at the gallery, Friday September 29th from 5 – 7:30 pm.

The Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith exhibition includes a selection of black and white and color images spanning the artist’s extraordinary career. Set against a backdrop of beautiful cities, gardens, and landscapes, each composition reflects his response to the world around him and his attempt to offer beauty, wit and whimsey to a world sometimes filled with chaos. From Reed Leaping over a Giant Top Hat to Saori on an Airplane Wing and Reed Reading Upside Down, each image in the exhibition combines brilliant composition, gorgeous color, and magical light with Rodney’s distinctive style of grace, substance and humor.

Rodney Smith (1947–2016) was born in New York City. Smith rejected the commercialism of his father, founder of Anne Klein and Pierre Cardin, to earn a Master’s degree in Theology from Yale University while studying photography under Walker Evans. In the late 1970’s, Smith began perfecting his technique and developing his style as he photographed a diverse mix of cultures around the world. By the mid-1990s, his editorial clients included The New York Times, W Magazine, Vanity Fair, Departures and NewYork Magazine and he photographed the advertising campaigns for Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Ralph Lauren and Paul Stuart, among others. After Smith’s death in 2016, his wife Leslie Smolan became Executive Director of The Estate of Rodney Smith, which is dedicated to preserving and sharing his archive with audiences around the world. Six books of Smith’s work have been produced, most recently including Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith , which was published by Getty Publications and written by Paul Martineau. This follows the J. Paul Getty Museum’s acquisition of ten Rodney Smith photographs for the museum’s permanent collection. Rodney Smith’s work is also included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and the Princeton University Art Museum, among others.