Sally Smart photographed by Anna Kucera, The National 2021: New Australian Art, MCA
Sally Smart is one of Australia's most venerated contemporary artists with a practice that engages identity politics: ideas relating to the body; the home and history. Smart graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (Master of Fine Arts) 1991 and attended the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne for a Post-graduate Diploma (Painting) in 1987-88.
Smart is recognised internationally for producing stunning, large-scale cut-out assemblage installations made from felt, canvas, silk-screened and everyday fabrics that she constructs with pins. Smart is a process-oriented artist, often presenting narratives that characteristically subvert gender hierarchies through deconstruction and reconstruction of historical events and political associations with the traditional activities of women. Her work identifies with the art practices of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, and reflects a long engagement with avant-garde modernist women artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Hoch, Lyubov Popova, and Sophie Taeuber, all exponents of work with performance, collage and textiles and a lineage of practice she shares.
Smart has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally and is represented in most major galleries and collections throughout Australia and in various collections both public and private, internationally. Smart’s most recent public exhibitions include P.A.R.A.D.E., Geelong Gallery, Victoria Australia (2022); Matisse Alive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2021); The Artist’s Ballet, The National 2021, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney (2021) and Bessie Davidson and Sally Smart Two Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde at Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo (2020).
In 2024, Smart had her second solo exhibition, Flaubert's Puppets, at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, following on from her first solo, Choreographies (The Artist’s Ballet) in 2021.
Smart has also been the recipient of numerous appointments, awards, publications and prizes, and has recently been awarded the Mordant Family and Creative Australia Affiliated Scholarship in 2024. She has been included in the Know My Name (Book) by the National Gallery of Australia (2020), appointed to the Visual Arts Australia Council Grant (2018); Jury Member Adelaide Contemporary, International Architecture Competition (2018) and a was a Trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia 2001-2008. Smart is currently Vice-Chancellors Professorial Fellow, VCA, University of Melbourne, Board member (Deputy Chair), National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and is a member of the Council of the National Gallery of Australia.
Sally Smart exhibits regularly throughout the world and in 2016 had three international exhibitions: The highly successful two person exhibition with Entang Wiharso Conversation: Endless Acts in Human History at the Galeri Nasional of Indonesia in Jakarta; her fourth solo exhibition The Choreography of Cutting with Postmasters Gallery in New York and the immersive The Exquisite Pirate installation commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum for their 20th anniversary exhibition Odyssey: Navigating Nameless Seas.
